Canonical announced this week that the newest version of Ubuntu will be released next Thursday, covering both the desktop and server versions. The new release will feature Arm support, a new cloud orchestration engine and updated OpenStack cloud software.

The Arm architecture has grown increasingly popular in the past few years as manufacturers are creating more low-powered tablets powered with Arm chips. Microsoft announced that its next version of the Windows desktop OS, Windows 8, will run on Arm.

On the server side, however, Arm is not as widely used. Microsoft has no plans to port its Windows Server OS to Arm. Canonical's Arm version of Ubuntu is not completely polished yet, Silber admitted.