"Ultimately, Ubuntu needs to respond to this by drawing the online and offline worlds together," he explained.

Accordingly, the first area of focus in this new release is the Dash, which has essentially been extended to incorporate the online world.

"The important thing about the Dash is that it's a search method rather than just about files and folders," George told me. "For this release, not only will it search for documents on your local hard drive, but also in Google Docs, for example, for files that are online.

"When I look for content, what I want to find is all of my content, whether online or off," he added.

The controversial also makes its official debut in this new release, complete with the "" Canonical added following user outcry.