Taking life philosophically.
10 February 2010
Although its release date is still more than two months away, and although it has not even entered feature freeze yet, the next version of the Ubuntu operating system—10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx—is already in good shape. I have been running the OS since last month’s Alpha 2 release (Alpha 3 is expected to arrive in a bit over a couple of weeks), and I have been very happy with it so far.
I am running Lucid on two rather different systems: on a generic desktop and on the Asus Eee PC 901 netbook. So far I have experienced one issue that could be called a major one, and it has already been fixed. Most of the problems I have had with earlier releases have been fixed as well. I am particularly happy about the way my Eee works now with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and how much easier it has become to configure my LyX/biblatex setup.
As this is still not even beta level software, there are still some bugs. But personally I find it astonishing that they are relatively minor, there are so few of them and they are fixed at an amazing rate. Obviously for serious use it is best to wait for the final April 29th release, if you have no urgent need to update your OS. But if the current state of the OS is any indication, this is shaping up to be a great release for Ubuntu.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.