Ubuntu 12.10 “effectively sets out the future direction of how Ubuntu will develop over the next two years,” said Steve George, who is Canonical’s vice president for communications and products. “The Internet has become an intrinsic part of user’s experience so we’ve been focusing on integrating online and offline services.”
The previous release, Ubuntu 12.04 released in April, was a long term release (LTS), meaning that Canonical focused on making that version as stable as possible, and will support it for two years. LTS releases are designed for enterprise users, which upgrade on fixed yearly cycles and tend to prefer fewer bugs over newer features.