Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzel Beta 2 first impressions

Hey folks, it's Martin here giving you a look a look at Canonical's newest addition to the Ubuntu family.

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Beta 2 has arrived, so that means another release of Ubuntu is upon us. For those of you who are thinking "What is Ubuntu?" or "I don't know what Linux is.", Ubuntu is an operating system , much like Windows or Mac OSX and it's based on a kernel, called Linux. The finer details are not so important, but if you've never heard of Ubuntu or ever considered using it, this might persuade you otherwise. For those of you new to Linux, you probably might want to skip this blog post. But stick around, in the next few days, I'll be posting another article on why you might seriously consider having a close look at Ubuntu. You might learn a thing or two that may be important in the coming months (*ahemwindows8ahem*). For the familiar, continue on to see what's coming down the pipe in the next fortnight.

For the familiar
Alright, so for those of you familiar to Ubuntu already and are still on 12.04 LTS (or other), here's what you can expect to see. Let's get the nitty gritty out of the way quickly, shall we? First, expect 12.10 to be shipping with Linux kernel 3.5, Unity 6.6 and a bevy of other updates to applications like Gimp and Libre Office. Personally, I haven't been a huge fan of Unity, but I have to be honest, it shaping up to be really nicely polished.

The new LibreOffice and Gimp (image credit: ZDNet)

Web-Apps
So the dash has been a little bit refined. First, you may have noticed a couple new icons in the dock; Ubuntu One Music and Amazon. These are simply web-apps and will open in Firefox (or your browser of choice). But, if your first thought is "Ugh, that is just blatant advertising", fear not, because it is simple to remove these icons. Personally, it doesn't bother me too much. If it helps support Canonical, I'm all for it. Thumbs up for seamless web-app integration.

New Amazon Web App (image credit: linuxo.com)

The Dash
The dash has seen some nice polish and added features in 12.10. The music lens has received an update cover flow effect (which to be honest, doesn't move me at all, but that's just me). Again, Ubuntu One Music and Amazon have been directly integrated too, so a quick press of the super key and you can be searching your whatever your heart desires on Amazon. Nice addition. Twitter's been directly integrated into the dash too, which leads on to my next point...

The new updated Dash (image credit: linuxo.com)

Social Network Integration
To me, quite possibly the neatest feature of 12.10 is the new Online Accounts in the settings application. With support for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many more, simply authenticate once to integrate your social networks across many of Ubuntu's surprisingly large selection of applications. So you can use Pidgin to manage all your social network accounts, Shotwell to manage all your photos, Gwibber to manage your feeds etc. and its all seamlessly integrated and is very clean. Awesome.

Online Accounts (image credit: ZDNet)

Summing it up
So I guess you can see the theme with Ubuntu 12.10 is integration. No longer are you sandboxed within a web browser, but connecting through the web is done through the operating system itself, and not just an application (i.e. web browser). Why should be expect the same experience that we could get on any other operating system by just using the web browser for everything?