Thunderbird is now the default email software in Oneiric Ocelot, meanwhile, and Canonical has worked closely with Mozilla developers to provide a fully integrated experience, Randal noted. “They did a full custom styling job for us to fit it into the Unity look and feel,” she explained.

Then there's Ubuntu One, the personal cloud service that offers access to data from PCs as well as Android and iOS devices. Users can stream their entire music collection to all their devices using the service, as well as accessing and sharing files, documents, and photos online, even with Windows machines. Every Ubuntu One subscriber gets 5GB of free storage.

A Version for ARM

On the server side, Ubuntu 11.10 has a whole other set of enhancements to offer.

“It's really a significant step for us in terms of pushing Ubuntu as the cloud platform for the future,” Baker told me.