A few quick thoughts on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

Although it’s still a little ways from release, I decided to give Ubuntu 9.04 a spin. Right now, development is “somewhere” between Beta and RC status, and things seem to be going quite well.

I decided to go ahead w/ Jaunty since it’s so near release, and if I was paving now, I’d rather go ahead and get my disks set up as ext4 to save the hassle of restoring from backups yet again down the road.

I haven’t run into any issues at all, but I wanted to make note of a few features I especially like:

First - I love the Notification UI - it’s very handy when dealing w/ multiple applications which use the Notification API.

Also, I like the new “shutdown menu” (not sure what else to call it). With this one applet, I can shut down, sleep/hibernate, and change my status in Pidgin - very nice.

I’d also like to mention boot speed - I’m not sure what has been done “under the hood” but 9.04 boots *very* quicky. Also, I’m very impressed so far w/ overall desktop speed and responsiveness.

I believe 9.04 will shape up to be a “killer release”, and should be well received by all Ubuntu users.

My main reason for paving over Vista was to check out KVM. I finally have a CPU now w/ Hardware Virtualziation, so I can finally use KVM. I find the technology to be very interesting, and I like the idea of having a virtualization solution that is fully integrated into the OS. So, expect some post as I explore and learn this new (too me) technology.

Cheers!