The developers are making the final adjustments

Oct 19, 2014 19:00 GMT  ·  By

Canonical is preparing to release Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) this week, and the operating system has just passed the Final Freeze point.

When Ubuntu hits the Final Freeze point, the developers stop pushing updates and changes and everyone focuses on the major bugs and problems that haven't been fixed yet. An exception can be made if something really terrible happens, but that wasn't the case until now and it's unlikely to occur.

Now, Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) is scheduled to arrive on October 23, this Thursday. Users will be offered the chance to upgrade their systems, but this is an intermediary release and it's not likely that many users will take this step. The Ubuntu LTS release was just six months ago and not too many users are going to exchange the five years of support for 14.04 with just nine months for 14.10.

Final Freeze is upon us

The launch date and all the other intermediary goals, like the Final Freeze for example, are set in advance and they usually remain the same throughout the development cycle.

"Here's hoping everyone gets on board with testing images, helping to fix absolutely critical bugs, donating spare creative cycles to the release notes, and any other way we can all contribute to yet another great Ubuntu release."

"Later tonight, we will be turning off the daily cron jobs and will spin up a set of RC images. As much as I'd love for them to be the final images, I'm not that optimistic, and I'm sure there will be reasons to respin, but please do get to testing, so we have a better handle on the state of the world as it is today," writes Canonical's Adam Conrad in one of this regular updates.

It's interesting to point out that the Release Candidate mentioned by Adam Conrad is not actually among the scheduled releases, but it's more like an internal testing version and it's not really designed for a larger audience, like the Final Beta.

Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) should be interesting and not really

Many users will also find that the upcoming Ubuntu release doesn't differ too much from 14.04 LTS from a design point of view. It was easy in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to point out the new features, but it's much more difficult to do that for Ubuntu 14.10. The problem is that most of the changes are under the hood and there are thousands of updated packages, including the Linux kernel and a few other major ones.

It will be labeled as a boring release, but boring usually also means stable. The Ubuntu 14.10 daily build can be downloaded from Softpedia, if you want to take a look for yourself. It should be pretty close to the version that will land on October 23.