Ubuntu 8.10: My own first impressions.

This isn’t a review, these are simply my thoughts and experiences with around one hour total of keyboard time with the new Ubuntu release so far. I posted earlier today with some links to more “traditional reviews”, so check those out if that’s what you are looking for - those folks write better reviews than I do anyway :-).

I’ll admit that initially I was pretty worried about this release of Ubuntu. I have had a history of bad luck with the x.10 releases - in fact the only x.10 that I didn’t have major problems with was 5.10. With 6.10, I just went back to 6.06 until 7.04 came out. Feisty (7.04) was absolutely the best Ubuntu version ever for me - and even though I didn’t have a machine still running it, I was a little sad when it went EOL - it was a good release for me. Gutsy, 7.10 is what ended my long running loyalty with Ubuntu - I had so many problems with 7.10 it sent me into a distro-hopping tailspin I still haven’t completely recovered from. Hardy, 8.04 redeemed some of that, but I still kept hopping - it’s hard to stop once you start…I even hopped back to different flavors of Windows on my home machine at times (Vista most recently).

As I posted last night, I simply couldn’t let this release slip by without checking it out - I’m glad I did. Although it’s still early, I think 8.10 will break the x.10 curse for me, and I also think it’ll be the end to my hopping (unless 9.04 breaks everything again :-P).

I think Ubuntu made wise choices with this release, and now that it has been released. I was initially worried about 8.10 due to the fact that it was the rockiest Beta/RC installs for me ever with Ubuntu. I was almost certain that 8.10 was going to be horrible, but I have to give kudos to the devs - everything got fixed, and it seems to be a solid release. I’m sure there will be plenty of people on the Ubuntu Forums saying that 8.10 is the worst release ever - that it will eat your kids and burn your house down, but that happens with every release.

Here are a few highlights for me:

DKMS: Best thing ever for folks like me who have drivers/applications that need custom modules (Proprietary Video drivers and Virtualization software, for example).

I also really like the subtle changes to the layout of the top panel - I like the new “Shutdown Button” which now uses a drop-down menu, and I was surprised when I realized that it integrated into Pidgin.

Although this isn’t Ubuntu specific, I love the tabbed browsing in Nautilus.

It boots fast - very fast - in fact it boots faster than any OS I’ve loaded on this machine.

I can’t believe the Sub-Pixel font rendering - it is absolutely beautiful. I’m now sure what has changed, but something has.

There is a (working) up-to-date Virtualbox 2-OSE in the repository (this is huge for me to have a viable virtualization solution within the distro).

Overall the distro feels faster (could also be because I’m coming off of Vista ) although I don’t have any benchmarks to back that up. It just feels nice and snappy - it feels complete, professional and mature. Ubuntu catches a lot of slack from many different directions of the Linux community sometimes, but I think anyone would be more hard-pressed to find any Linux distro as “consumer-ready” as Ubuntu.