The last release was Natty Narwhal (Letter N) for the 11.04. Then it was Oneiric Ocelot (Letter O) for the 11.10. This time, the newest one will be Precise Pangolin (Letter P) for the 12.04.
At this pace, what will happen when Ubuntu gets to Z? Will it start with numbers (007 Edition), will it start with double letters (AA Battery), or will it start from the beginning (Amazing Apple)? What will happen?
As questions go - this pretty much will be a decision made by Mark Shuttleworth himself.
Maybe we could start doubling the initial like in Aalenian Aal or Aalenian Aardvark We could restart using flowers or plants instead of animals. e. g. Apologetic Anemone For release 17.10 i suggest Ambitious Aye Aye Maybe: Awesome Alebrije? I like the idea of using plants next. Or perhaps rocks/minerals.
Thus as you have indicated we are in the realms of speculation.
On the link below - the wrap around to A is described up to F - Flying Fox, etc., i.e., Ubuntu 20.04
What is beyond that - happy speculating.
Useful link:
It could just follow ASCII, and ultimately Unicode, order.
This may eventually require genetic engineering to breed new animals with appropriate names.
That gets a lot tougher after AA.
But seriously, there are plenty of other verbs, adjectives and animals for each letter, so I expect it stay the same for 17.10.
And remember that is a long time (that's like a hundred years in Internet years) so Ubuntu might be doing something completely different by then.
Note: I look forward to you accepting (or down-voting) this in ~60 months time. Puts it on his calendar!
I think we need to use adverbs and start over with A's.
and so on...
I don't think people use adverbs enough in conversation, especially programmers like me.
Let's just get past the end of the Mayan calendar first, and then we'll worry about the Z of Ubuntu. It would be nice if the Z of Ubuntu would get as much attention as the end of the Mayan calendar though. It is actually somewhat similar. We have the 6-month cycle, the 24 month cycle and the big cycle, which is the turn of the alphabet :)
What do you think Mark Shuttleworth thought when he came up with the Adjective Animal scheme? The guy on the right does have the same cool attitude that the SABDFL has, doesn't he? :)
How about this! in maths after number 9, 10 comes. that means 1 and 0, as in the example ubuntu will be Amazing Badger, Amazing Catfish :-)
I suppose Apple will have to consider the same sort of thing eventually, when they run out of cats. Maybe they'll have a "Schrodinger's Cat" and then move on to something else. (Come to think of it, I wish WE could have a "Schrodinger's Cat!" Maybe that'll have to wait for "Ubuntu for Quantum Computing.")
It is most likely that Mark will start using Caribbean terminologies as we have such an extensive vocabulary to choose from in our dialects. I expect that he will probably start with Restarting Rastaman after Z, to signify the switch to the new naming scheme.
--
On a more serious note, by the time that happens, we will likely be advanced in many other areas, or maybe the world might have ended - in other words, we just don't know. It's like Ubuntu will just start using animals beginning with A and going down, or switch to just descriptive words.
I'd advised to call it:
Autistic Aardvark
That would rise autism awareness and PRs for Canonical which could donate to some organizations.
