It’s that time of year when Canonical releases the first of two Ubuntu operating systems. Canonical releases two Ubuntu operating systems every year and this year is no different. This year sees the release of a version of Ubuntu that is not LTS (long-term support), meaning it will be commercially supported and offer free security updates for up to 18 months after release.
Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28, 2011 and remains the most popular Linux desktop distribution today.
From a non-technical everyday user, let’s find out what makes this particular distribution different from the rest of the Ubuntu versions released before or even how it would be fair against Windows 7, in terms of ease of use and usability.
The first noticeable difference is the default theme used in this particular distro, the taskbar and its icons are aligned on the left side and have the appearance of almost the taskbar of Windows 7 icons. This type of approach is a step in the right direction to attract new users to Ubuntu, the icons displayed on the taskbar are basically the most used icons, plus there is room for additional icons if needed.
Another noticeably new feature in Ubuntu 11.04 is the introduction of Libre Office 3, which is an Office suite application program that replaced the Open office program. Libre Office 3 works as well as any version of MS Office, be it Office 2007/2010 and can read any MS Office document and vice versa. Depending on the release of Ubuntu, they are programs that can be installed on Ubuntu and can run any Windows-based application program, including the full MS Office suite plus other Microsoft Windows-based programs. So any program that can run on Windows can also run on Ubuntu, with the appearance of working from within Windows.
In terms of speed Ubuntu 11.04 turned out to be quite fast compared to Ubuntu 10.10 and in my opinion it is even much faster than Windows 7. All I can say is that this is the fastest Ubuntu release to date.
As Ubuntu slowly and progressively gains more market share for desktop operating systems, which is dominated by Windows, the release of Ubuntu 11.04 is a step in the right direction, but only time will tell how far Ubuntu is willing to go. and how much more users. friendly they claim to make the Ubuntu operating system.
