Ubuntu 13.10 : 8 Solid Reasons to Upgrade

As with every new release of Ubuntu, there's a lot of fanfare involved with 13.10. Everyone at Canonical is excited to present their latest, most stable iteration of the open-source operating system. Ubuntu fans, on the other hand, are busy twitching their fingers waiting for the download to complete so that they can try out the new version. However, if we were to peek into the deep dark world of forums and blog comments, not everyone seems that excited about 13.10. In fact, many users, including longtime Ubuntu users themselves, are calling this release boring with no interesting features or visual enhancements to offer. From the looks of it, Saucy Salamander does seem like a vapid iteration of Ubuntu 13.04, or a "mere update" as some people would say. However, we slightly beg to differ. We have not one not two but eight good reasons for you to go to ubuntu.com right now and start dowloading this latest release.

Probably the biggest reason you should update to Ubuntu 13.10 is Smart Scopes. This feature gives you access to all the online resources right from your desktop. It's like having a full-blown search engine built right into your desktop. One of the most interesting things about Smart Scopes is that it lets you search anything right from the dashboard. So, whether you're looking for a Wikipedia article or just another file on your computer, Dash now acts as a feature-laden assistant at your service.

Ubuntu 13.10 comes with the latest kernel that is version 3.11. This release adds experimental code for dynamic power management (DPM) in Ubuntu's open source Linux drivers. The feature was already present in ATI AMD Catalyst driver, but now, bringing the feature to the open source drivers makes things even better.That's not all, the kernel upgrade will also give your desktop better power management along with a bunch of other improvements. Expect a speedier and a much stable desktop experience with this release.

Many minor annoyances are fixed in this release, especially with the user interface. Rough edges are smoothened out thus making the UI more consistent than ever before. In a span of six months, developers worked hard on fixing a lot of things that disrupted the user experience. Also, GNOME-based apps look better than ever before in this release.

Unity has been upped to the latest version making it even more faster and stable. These days, there are rarely any people who complain about a slow or buggy Unity interface. It is thanks to these incremental changes to the interface that Canonical has managed to achieve a great, stable desktop. Unity 7, which is further polished in Saucy, in other words, is the most stable, the most user-friendly release of the shell interface so far. Many people are excited to know what Unity 8 will bring to the users. Guess you'll have to wait till April 2014, to find out since the tentative release date for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is 17 April 2014.

When Ubuntu initially launched Unity, it got a lot of bad rep for being unstable and buggy. Come 2013 and the same Unity interface has become one of the most stable and mature interfaces out there. Also, with a lot of behind-the-scenes fixes, Ubuntu, overall, has proven to be a solid competitor to Windows and Mac OS X. With developers working round the clock to make each release better than ever, 13.10 takes its predecessor's famed stability to a whole new level.

This release brings the latest version of your favorite tools to your desktop. No more looking around for PPAs; the latest and the greatest iterations of your essential tools is packed into this release. LibreOffice, for example, has been updated to version 4.1.1 while Firefox to version 24.

If you're someone who uses multiple keyboard layouts, the new keyboard applet will come in very handy to you. Sitting quietly on the top bar, it allows you to switch between multiple layouts with the click of a button. Certainly, a nice addition as far as usability is concerned.

Ubuntu 13.10 comes with fresh, new wallpapers that will help you dress up your desktop in the most beautiful way possible. For many people, the wallpaper is one of the most important aspects of the desktop experience. If you belong to that category, this release packs some of the most gorgeous wallpapers we've ever seen. If you want to take a quick look at the wallpapers included in this release, you can go to Launchpad.