Shuttleworth: Maverick Meerkat 10.10 release will be lean, mean, social

Mark Shuttleworth says the next generation of Ubuntu -- dubbed Maverick Meerkat -- will be lean, mean and social.

In his blog posted Friday, the Ubuntu Linux founder said he is shooting for a "Perfect 10" with the 10.10 release, which will follow the 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" Long Term Support release now in beta.

"Once we have released the LTS we have plenty of room to shake things up a little .... Meerkats are, of course, light, fast and social – everything we want in a Perfect 10. We’re booting really fast these days, but the final push remains. Changes in the toolchain may make us even faster for every application," Shuttleworth penned in his blog.

"Our new theme is light and the next cycle will embrace that at many levels. We have a continued interest in netbooks, and we’ll revamp the Ubuntu Netbook Edition user interface. As computers become lighter they become more mobile, and we’ll work to keep people connected, all day, everywhere. We’ll embrace the web, aiming for the lightest, fastest web experience on any platform. The fastest boot, the fastest network connect, the fastest browser. Our goal is to ensure that UNE is far and away the best desktop OS for a netbook, both for consumers and power users," he wrote.

Social networking will be a major emphasis, and Ubuntu's Social from the Start effort will drive that development, he noted.

"It’s not all about work. We don’t just want to be connected to the internet, we want to be connected to each other. Social from the Start is our initiative to make the desktop a collaborative, social place. For the past five years, we’ve all been shifting more and more data into the web, to a series of accounts and networks elsewhere. Now it’s time to start to bring those social networks back into our everyday computing environment. Our addressbooks and contact lists need to be synchronized and shared, so that we have the latest information everywhere – from mobile phones to web accounts."

"We’re Social from the Start, but we could get even more tightly connected, and we could bring social features into even more applications," wrote Shuttleworth, who ceded the reigns as CEO to former Canonical COO Jane Silber last month so that he could focus on software development.

"Meerkats are family-oriented, and we aspire to having Ubuntu being the safe and efficient solution for all the family netbooks. They are also clever – meerkats teach one another new skills."