equinoxius.com

I use Ubuntu on all my computers as my open source OS of choice.

On April 29th the latest Ubuntu update was released, version 10.04, named Lucid Lynx.

As always the upgrade was pretty easy, started by pressing a convenient button that appeared on the upgrade manager, prompting me to upgrade to 10.04.

The upgrade process was almost fully automatic, it was interrupted only a couple times asking for confirmation to remove some old packages, and for some information pop ups, no big deal on those.

Now, I have had people telling me different things regarding how to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version, some tell me to wipe my / partition installing from the live cd from scratch and others tell me to just use the upgrade feature.

Being a lazy person, I have been doing the latter, as far as I can recall, I have been upgrading my desktop PC from a scratch install of Ubuntu 8.04 up until 10.04 , and I have experienced no issue doing it like this.

After the upgrade was completed and the mandatory reboot done, here is what I saw:

Boots faster, takes the same time to get you going.

Booting up the OS is noticeably faster than in 9.10, however once you get to the login screen and enter your info, there is an also noticeable delay before your desktop appears, I don’t know if it’s just a consequence of me upgrading instead of installing from scratch, but in overall it’s taking the same time to get me going than in the previous version, perhaps it will be solved on a future updated ( if it’s not a local issue of mine ).

Window buttons on the left.

This is probably one of the most noticed and controversial changes with this version, the minimize, maximize and close buttons are on the left side of the windows, more akin as how the interface is on OSX, so if you are also a Mac user you will probably feel at home with the new layout, if you are an avid Windows user ( or just grew accustomed with the older Ubuntu releases ), this new layout will feel alien, and probably will piss you off.

From reading around, it seems there will be some new features that are going to be implemented on 10.10 ( scheduled to be released at the end of 10/10 ) which will need the space at the right, this change was done now to give some time for the users to get used with the new layout.

Luckily, as we are using a highly customizable OS, this button layout can be changed and quite easily, I’m going to put the how-to on a separate post, to keep it independent from the review ( and to make it more search engine friendly ).

Better social networking integration.

Nowadays everyone has at least a Facebook and a Twitter account, that’s why it’s an important goal for every desktop environment to provide a good and comfortable integration with all our social networks so we can let the whole world know that we just ate a piece of toast.

This new release comes with Gwibber, a social networking manager which allow us to check and update our Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts amongst others, from the same window. It integrates very nicely with the desktop allowing us to even push status updates amongst all our networks filling a convenient new text box under our user status section:

Though, for the life of me I can’t make Gwibber to add my Facebook account, I had no problems with Twitter, but I can only go as far as authorizing Gwibber to access my Facebook data, then, no matter how times I hit that “add” button, it just won’t add that to my list of broadcast accounts. From what I’ve read, I’m not the only one with that issue but it works without problems for some people. I’m hoping they push an update which fixes this, it’s a cool feature that I would like to take advantage of.

New Firefox and Thunderbird.

This is the usual one that happens with every Ubuntu update, now we have Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3 out of the box, I didn’t care much about the new Firefox as it doesn’t has any major change since 3.5 (at least on on the interface / feature side ) but I must say that I love this new Thunderbird, it has a whole lot of new features and it’s definitely worth a try.

Ubuntu One Music Store

Rhythmbox now has direct integration with multiple music stores, where you can purchase songs, of particular notice is the Ubuntu One store which will store songs on your Ubuntu One account for easy access amongst several PCs, certainly won’t use this feature, and I must say it feels weird that one of the new Ubuntu features is a store.

In Conclusion

Certainly I’m omitting a lot of stuff, but the above were my main impressions with this new Ubuntu release, I can say that I’m really happy with how it turned out, all my problems with it ( Gwibber not adding Facebook accounts and the first login delay ) probably will be fixed in the following updates. The new features are really interesting and personally I recommend going for this upgrade.

What are your thoughts or impressions about this ? Feel free to leave a comment.