Mark Shuttleworth Announces Ubuntu 13.04 Name: Raring Ringtail | Hacker News Reader

Mark Shuttleworth Announces Ubuntu 13.04 Name: Raring Ringtail

markshuttleworth.com

31 pointsfingerprinter22 comments

let’s measure our core platform by mobile metrics, things like battery life, number of running processes, memory footprint, and polish the rough edges that we find when we do that. The tighter we can get the core, the better we will do on laptops and the cloud, too.

Finally!!!

I agree, this is wonderful news! Other than certain rough edges, battery life is about the only respect in which Linux lags behind its competitors that matters to me.

And it appears to vary wildly. On my laptop I get slightly more battery life out of linux (AMD Fusion, fglrx driver), others get from slightly worse to much worse.

I wish Ubuntu and debian would bin code names. I'm forever confused as to which release version has which code name. there needs to be one clear name for the release, which should be the version number.

The code names are not the problem, they are easy to remember and give an operating system more personality. It's the sheer number of Ubuntu releases within the time frame of one Windows or OS X release.

Most people do not have any problem remembering OS X's code names. In fact, many of my friends and colleagues refer to OS X versions by their feline names. Most would be hard-pressed to come up with the version number of, say, Snow Leopard.

(iOS is somewhat peculiar in this respect. Since people always tend to run the latest version, people often don't refer to particular versions.)

Maybe if OS X is your primary or only OS. I use OS X as a secondary OS (a macbook air I use mainly while on the move) and it's one of 4 or 5 OSs I interact with regularly. I know my laptop run 10.7 and I know 10.8 just came out, but I have no idea which cat either of them are. The few people I know who also use Macs also tend to refer to the OS by number rather than cat name.

actually for OS X I have often forgotten and myself and many coders I know are one or more versions behind. I have to try to guess which cat is more bad ass: tiger or leopard ? I don't know which one would win in a fair fight.

and I find it quite annoying that they officially describe them as tiger, leopard, snow leopard and yet there is nowhere in the OS itself to tell you this. About This Mac : 10.6.8

> Most people do not have any problem remembering OS X's code names

[Citation needed] because my anecdotal evidence suggests the complete opposite.

I don't even bother trying to remember the code names. I've been using 12.04 for four or five months and I couldn't tell you the code name off the top of my head. If I really need to know it, I know I can just have a quick look in /etc/apt/sources.list

They're going alphabetically if you haven't noticed.

Debian gets a new code name roughly every two years, surely that's not so hard? You're probably also going to get better results googling for a tech issue with "debian squeeze" than "debian 6", given that 6 is a more common term in general.

For past versions I assume everybody uses the number anyways. (How old is Hoary Hedgehog?)

Until you have to frig around with apt sources which are all code name based.

Good point. They could easily use symlinks for version number apt sources, though.

Or just say sod it and use version numbers and do away with the names.

  $ cat /etc/lsb-release
  DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
  DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
  DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
  DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS"

I'm going to go out on a limb here - Recumbent Rhinoceros would have been a ridiculously more awesome name for 13.04.

ringtail is a disease in rats... http://www.merckmanuals.com/pethealth/exotic_pets/rats/disor...

It's also a raccoon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring-tailed_cat

And a possum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ringtail_possum

And a lemur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring-tailed_lemur

I had £10 on Rapey Rhino

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