I have been running lucid on my desktop for about two months know fully knowing the caveats. Here are some things ive found
a) Its visually the most slick linux distro I have used so far.
b) Ubuntu now has a cloud offering for consumers which allows you to sync data between computers much like dropbox.
c) Ubuntu now has a enterprise cloud offering where the act of maintaining multiple ubuntu computers has been simplified. You can install packages / run commands on multiple machines at once from convenient web interface. You can even check on the machine load from this interface. - <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private" rel="nofollow">http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private</a>
d) Plymouth now comes standard. This means the entire boot experience from bootup to X is very seamless. Kudos to the fedora folks for coming up with this, props to the ubuntu folks for integrating it.
e) The only issue ive had with lucid is that 2 of my 1.5TB SATA drives are not detected. Ive opened a ticket for this sometime back but the ticket hasnt received any love so far.<p>All in all, lucid is a great release. It will make it harder for my osx using friends to make fun of my desktop. Tux has shiny new clothes :)
The look and feel is much improved. The default theme is great -- some of the reds/oranges could be tweaked, tasteful use of transparency (Win 7's is pretty gaudy, IMO), useful desktop effects (alt-tab, desktop switching, minimize/restore). My favorite improvement is all the stuff they did to get rid of the system tray and consolidate the "notification area". It looks better and is much more useful. Occasionally the battery icon disappears which is annoying but hopefully that's fixed in the final release.<p>Everything (almost) worked out of the box on my Thinkpad SL410. The mute and mic button on the keyboard don't work by default. Hibernate on lid-close, power saving, and all that jazz work perfectly. It cold boots incredibly fast. Noticeably faster than Windows 7.<p>I haven't figured out how to disable the track pad yet (it isn't in the mouse settings). :/<p>I've been using the RC for almost a week and had it crash once because of (I believe) Pulse Audio. <i>shakes fist in air menacingly</i><p>Before I was using Arch and it never crashed (in a year) but I was using fewer programs and it was very utilitarian.
My relationship with Ubuntu is always the same:<p><pre><code> 1. A release of Ubuntu comes out. Hey, this sounds cool.
2. I download a live CD and try it out.
3. I realize it is in fact pretty cool, really fast, very full-featured.
4. It critically fails to support some essential piece of hardware.
5. I go back to OS X and the cycle repeats a few releases later.
</code></pre>
The fatal flaw in this release: My trackpad dies every time I sleep my MacBook Pro.
Oh dear, I still have a server on 8.04 and a desktop with 9.04. I'm falling behind the times, it seems, but I'm too paranoid about doing something to kmail to upgrade. the server, well, I'm too paranoid about doing something to anything to upgrade that.
I am very grateful and supportive to Ubuntu but this thing of the six months release has always been a pain in the neck. I switched to Arch a year ago and never looked back. Now I have the latest version of all softwares, always.
Is anyone aware if the left-justified max/min/close buttons are still left-justified, or if that was corrected? There was an article about a month ago discussing this (and its inherent silliness) but I'm not sure if it still exists as such.<p>Looking at <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand</a> seems to indicate that it still is, and perhaps as trivial as this may seem, it is discouraging me from upgrading.<p>(edit) I haven't yet had a chance to download a live CD of a release candidate.
I am downloading the ISO right now - I have a new hardware laptop that I have had problems getting wireless working, and I have happy expectations that 10.04 will recognize my hardware. It helps a lot to not buy the latest hardware to give the Linux community time to get drivers. Lesson learned.
Last week only I downloaded the RC version of Ubuntu 10.04. Quite happy!! Mac inspired design :) I am running in Virtual Box apart from resolution I didn't face much difficulties going smooth!! though I m not using much feature apart from learning Ruby & RoR...
From the announcement (<a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2010-April/000133.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2010-April...</a>): "Users of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS may wish to wait for 10.04.1 LTS, due in July 2010, before upgrading."<p>Anyone know why? Surely we're not adopting the 'wait for service pack 1' approach?
Just downloaded the amd64 version (from The Netherlands).
It's very strange, it looks like this is not a bootable CD.<p>It's more like an autorun CD with Wubi.
Anyone else got the same problem?<p>(downloading it as torrent right now)
Hate the dark theme. Feels like a skinned desktop from the nineties.<p>Changed to a light theme which looks ok but like the same I used in the last 10 years...<p>When will I install an Ubuntu that doesn't make me feel so "Oh this is still Linux"...<p>Also, why isn't VLC the default video player yet?
Ugh the world is against me today. I'm at work, got the iso, can't find a USB key to install the new version on my netbook, fingers crossed this version actually boots. O well, 2 hrs till the desktop upgrade completes. EXCITEMENT!