The next incarnation of Ubuntu, version 18.10, will be known as Cosmic Cuttlefish, with the focus set to be on making the operating system more secure.
The new name was announced by Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, who hinted at what would happen on the journey to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (the next Long Term Support release, which happens every two years, and gives users who stay on it five years’ worth of support).
Shuttleworth stated that he was starting to value security above any other feature of the distro, underlining its overarching importance in every aspect of an OS. His broad vision is to improve the confidence users have in the “security of their systems and their data”.
Shuttleworth noted: “Security is the one thing that every community wants – and it’s something that, on reflection, we can raise the bar even higher on.”
Reaching for resilience
And that’s certainly true enough. There isn’t anybody out there who wouldn’t want the operating system they use to be a little more resilient against the ever-increasing amount of malware and threats which are sloshing around out there online.
However, the lack of anything exciting being mentioned – security isn’t exactly a feature to get the pulse racing – may leave some Ubuntu fans a touch cold. But this is just a small initial teaser, and we can hardly make a call on exactly how Cosmic Cuttlefish is going to shape up at this point, of course.
Canonical released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver – yes, they all sport rather frivolous names) just under a fortnight ago, which came with the GNOME desktop (rather than Unity) and dropped support for 32-bit installer images – and that certainly stoked some controversy among Linux fans as we discussed at the time.
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