Ubuntu 14.10's Feature Freeze Is This Wednesday

For good or bad, it sure seems like time flew by the past few months of the Ubuntu 14.10 development cycle; the feature freeze for the Utopic Unicorn is this week.

On 21 August is the Ubuntu 14.10 feature freeze while next week marks the beta one release for the Ubuntu 14.10 flavors opting into doing a beta release -- Ubuntu itself still doesn't do betas but Canonical encourages testing at will of their daily live ISOs.

On 11 September is then the Ubuntu 14.10 user-interface freeze, documentation string freeze on 18 September, and final beta freeze and beta release on 25 September. The kernel freeze is to happen on 9 October, the final freeze on 16 October, and the Ubuntu 14.10 final release should take place on 23 October.

For the Ubuntu 14.10 cycle, most of Canonical's focus has been around readying Ubuntu for mobile devices with their Unity 8 work and Mir along with early steps towards their convergence vision and bringing Click packages to the desktop. Ubuntu 14.10 has also taken some early steps towards systemd support, upgraded to GCC 4.9, is powered by Linux 3.16, offers a Unity 8 desktop preview, and pulls in a wide variety of other updated packages over Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Stay tuned for more Ubuntu 14.10 benchmarks and other performance tests from Phoronix in the weeks ahead.