Daniel Hardy

The upcoming Ubuntu release, Hardy Heron had its first beta release today and I decided to take it for a spin.  Overall there is a lot of improvements to the user experience and the product continues to grow at great rates.  As with any beta software try it at your own risk.   Here are some more thoughts form the first hour of use.

The good

• Smoother boot… the screens blend together with out the jarring resolution changes
• Love the new background used on the GDM and desktop.  I think this is the best one yet
• Theme in general is a lot more polished
• Love the package manager icon in the task bar that lets you know when it is being used.
• Firefox 3 is fantastic
• System Monitor looks 100x better
• Avant Window Navigator is in the Repository
• “Add to Panel” redesign is great

The bad

• A change in the Intel 3945 wireless driver prevented me from connecting to a hidden SSID network.  I had to set the SSID to visible to connect.  After the first connection I was able to turn it off again.
• 3D doesn’t seem to work as smooth on my 945 graphics
• The initial install had a large increase in idle memory footprint.  This is mostly because of several new features that are probably pretty handy for most users.  Idle was about 325Mbs. (I have eliminated several items I don’t use and it is down to 285Mb)

The ugly

•  Firefox 3 is blends with the operating system… I miss the old look and when a theme is available, I will be adding it.
• I would have liked to see more advancements in the general theme for this release but it just did not make it in time.