I hope this statement doesn’t come back to bite me in the (rear)end, but at this point I think this is the best Ubuntu release to date! I have had zero issues - everything works as expected. I have even noticed fewer than usual “Intrepid Sucks and killed my kitten” threads over on the Ubuntu Forums this time around as well.

I was surprised however, to come across a thread talking about 8.10 being slower than 8.04, and then I found this article over on Phoronix which used their benchmark suite to test previous version of Ubuntu over Ibex and it came to the same conclusion. I still stick to my guns saying it at least feels faster on my hardware, so YMMV. Phoronix did say in their article (on page 10):

We will continue our testing process to see if we can find the underlying cause(s) of these performance problems along with testing out other hardware to see if this was an isolated hardware incident. You can test out the performance of your Linux desktop by installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running any of the numerous tests or suites that ship with this open-source