Lucid Lynx: Codename for Ubuntu 10.04
Lucid (Adjective): Easily understandable, clearly perceived.
It's time to close your eyes, and take a trip into the future. When? How about April, 2010. Where? How about right where you are now. No this isn't a "where do you see yourself in a year" blog entry. It's a journey through about 30 minutes of my life.
Ok, right, so the interest level at this point is probably sinking lower than the titanic did. This journey you are about to partake in is my vision of where I hope to see Ubuntu for it's next release.
Imagine getting home from work around 6:50PM, you are tired, worn out, and the next thing you are itching to do is relax because your boss kept you late. Take a venture to your comfy desk chair, turn on the monitor, or flip up your laptop lip, and boot into your newly installed/upgraded Ubuntu 10.04 installation.
Quick and snappy like water flowing down a river, the system boots up, and within 10 seconds you are ready to log in. While it's waiting for your user input it loads the necessary drivers and default settings, so as soon as you hit the enter key from typing in your password your desktop appears like it came out of thin air.
Don't look now but that blinking light you're used to waiting to stop blinking before you can use your computer, has already stopped.
While you were sitting there admiring the serenity of no blinking light you received 5 new instant messages, you notice the blinking orange dot on the indicator applet icon and click it to find out whats up. Hey, you got 3 new e-mails in GMail and your boss sent you an e-mail on your work account. Works most important, but you don't want to forget about the people in GMail. Well don't worry about that, the indicator applet light has stopped blinking but stayed orange to let you know there are items that still need your attention but you've already noticed them.
You click on the entry in your indicator applet for your work e-mail and Evolution is already loaded with the list of new e-mails. You finish replying when the notification applet notifies you of a video chat you promised your father today for his birthday at 7:00PM. Thankfully you had your google calendar linked in evolution so it knew to notify you.
OH NO! You realize it's 6:59 PM, and your father only has AIM video chat! Well don't worry about the hastle of switching over to windows, empathy's video and voice interface has been the primary focus of this release and to your surprise the notification applet is notifying you of your fathers request to webcam and upon clicking the notification you can start your video birthday wishes.
Finally, the video chat is over, and you start chatting with your best friend. They are anxious to share a few new songs with you while you work on your project together. Your friend offers to share their desktop with you so you can work together, theres no need to transfer files, you can listen to their music right from their desktop, as well as edit the file from there as well. You load banshee and your friends library appears for you to listen to. You load nautilus so you can access your project files on their computer.
There were quick edits to make, and you've decided you want to have a copy of it for yourself, well just by drag and drop through nautilus you can copy the folder contents to your computer.
7:15 comes along and you and your friend are getting bored so you decide to play a game together. You both vote on checkers. As your friend invites you to join their loaded game, the notification applet lets you know they've invited you and you click the notification, checkers loads with your friends first move already made... sneaky friend!
Sneaky wasn't good enough, and you beat them with ease. As you close out the game you notice the red blinking light in the indicator applet, Ubuntu has security updates available. You decide to do them later, so upon clicking out of the indicator applet the light stops blinking and goes back to orange signifying you have things that require your attention later.
Ok, time to come back to today. Yes these things seem like a stretch from reality, but the steps are in place for these things to become reality quicker than you imagine. The telepathy framework, empathy desktop sharing, evolutions linked calendars, notification applets, indicator applets, will all help allow us to eventually do all of the things mentioned above. If that was only 30 minutes of fun, imagine how much fun you can have in an hour, a day, even a week using Ubuntu 10.04.
By the time 10.04 comes around, it will be easy to see how lucid the lynx has become in such a short time.
