Ubuntu 14.04 Codename Revealed, Mir Haters Attacked

Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the codename of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release while also having some choice words about those criticizing Canonical's Mir Display Server, and comparing them to an Open Source Tea Party.

First of all, Mark has codenamed Ubuntu 14.04 the Trusty Tahr. A Tahr is "three species of large Asian ungulates related to the wild goat." From Wikipedia, this is the successor to the Saucy Salamander (Ubuntu 13.10):

Mark Shuttleworth wrote on his blog, "The tahr navigates Himalayan heights, shaggily suited, sure-footed and steady. A small tourist tahr population lived on my favourite Table Mountain, and while they’ve made way for indigenous animals, for a long time they symbolised hardiness and fearlessness, perched as they were against the cliffs. We’ll do well together. Let’s get cracking!"

Mark's Mir comments included:

Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;) And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on… most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we’ll get it done, and it will be amazing.

I can tell you what the agenda of the Mir team is: speed, quality, reliability, efficiency. That’s it. From what I’ve seen on the smartphone, Mir is going to be a huge leap forward for gaming performance, battery life and next-generation display capabilities. So thank you for the many contributions we had to Mir, and to everyone who is testing it in more challenging environments than the smartphone. I’m enjoying it on my laptop and loving the gaming benchmarks for native Mir. So to that team, and the broader community who are helping test and refine Mir, thank you.