Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail is out now

Canonical has released a new version of Ubuntu, numbered at 13.04. The new version of the Linux distribution, named Raring Ringtail, brings a ton of changes, with the most prominent one being a Unity interface that works better. Canonical has made Unity much lighter and stable than it was before. It leaves a smaller memory footprint on your RAM and works smoothly. You can grab the latest version of Ubuntu from the official website.

“Performance on lightweight systems was a core focus for this cycle, as a prelude to Ubuntu’s release on a range of mobile form factors,” Canonical said during the announcement. “As a result 13.04 delivers significantly faster response times in casual use, and a reduced memory footprint that benefits all users.”

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The other major change to the Linux distribution is that it now has better support for graphics drivers. Despite this, however, using Nvidia’s or Intel’s own drivers might give better performance.

The new version of Ubuntu has a more stable Unity launcher

Ubuntu 13.04 also comes with a new version of LibreOffice. Numbered at 4.0, the new version mostly has under-the-hood features, such as having moved completely from Python 2.6 to Python 3.3, and having less dependencies on Java.

Canonical has also revealed that Ubuntu 13.04 comes with Python 3 out of the box, and if users want to use software that was developed on Python 2, they will have to get the package manually. Thankfully, Python 2 is said to be available for the foreseeable future as the python package.

Overall, 13.04 seems to be a step forward in Canonical’s aims of combining the mobile and the computer OS into one. It is said the culmination of this will be seen in 14.04, which will be able to run on both mobiles, as well as computers.

Ubuntu 13.04 is set to be the midway point between Ubuntu’s two-year development cycle. The more stable 12.04 is going to be supported for five years, and was released last year. 13.04 will only be getting security updates for nine months. The next ‘Long Term Support’ edition of Ubuntu, 14.04, will be released in 2014.

Canonical released the latest version of Ubuntu, 12.10, mere days before the launch of Windows 8. Ubuntu veterans would find little to no difference between 12.10 and the previous release, 12.04, except for the new HUD. The key differences between the old and new version include bug fixes and patches for existing packages found in Ubuntu 12.04. A new Linux kernel, version 3.5.0-17, is also in use with the new operating system.