Thoughts On Ubuntu 10.04

I’ve had the latest version of Ubuntu installed for a few days now and I believe I can sum it up in one word: polished. This release has been the most stable and least troublesome yet. I’ve noticed that 9.10 my wireless connection would take ~10 seconds to connect, in Lucid it is nearly instantaneous. The boot time is considerably faster which is saying a lot as the boot time was slashed from 9.04 to 9.10. The new “me” menu is a nice addition and the overall look and feel is very nice. I must say, I was a bit confused about why they moved the minimize, maximize and close buttons to the left though, but after a day or so, it becomes second nature to mouse over to the left. Also, since the release, Mark Shuttleworth has detailed some new plans for Window Indicators which I think will be interesting. It is good to see some innovation and I think this can only be a good thing for Ubuntu.

While this is all nice though, some of my favorite apps still do not have proxy support which is very frustrating. I wish I knew why there is no proxy support with these apps that should support a global proxy since the primary reason they exist is to utilize an internet connection. Empathy is a perfect example of this – why would you replace a long-standing application with good plugins and active development like Pidgin with Empathy? I believe that if you are replacing something, it should have the same or more features. What is even more frustrating though is that some of these apps such as Gwibber or Banshee don’t even tell you they can’t connect.

Despite the proxy issues, which are minor and just annoying, this is a great release. Practically everything works as expected and I think this will be a great LTS release.