Yesterday I took the plunge and upgraded my installation of Ubuntu to the freshly squeezed 10.04 aka “Lucid Lynx”. Yeah, the codenames are silly, but I find that they help identify the generation you’re using. Whatever.
These are some random assorted impressions after the first 24 hours of use.
First off, the frickin’ disk I/O whatever bug is still there. It seems a bit mitigated, but heavy disk I/O will still make my computer take long and completely unwarranted pauses. THIS IS INCREDIBLY ANNOYING, and even more annoying is the fact that more than two years down the road and no one still knows why this is happening or how we fix it. Sure, we’re relatively a minority of users who are affected by this, but we’re still lots of people. This is a big, big blight on the otherwise quite good Ubuntu-stamp of approval.
The upgrade went fine, even if it took ungodly long. I think the upgrade took a total of six (!) hours for me, and I heavily suspect the above mentioned disk I/O regression whatever bullshit is to blame for it. I could theoretically still use my computer while upgrading, but it was essentially like trying to pass a kidney stone so I simply let the machine putter for all that time and resorted to my laptop. Which is blissfully unaffected by that bug, even though the funky onboard ATI x300 has some quirks. I’ll be upgrading the laptop to Lucid in a few days, and maybe those quirks will disappear by then – although I don’t have very high hopes that they will.
After the upgrade finished I rebooted. There were a few tense moments when all I stared at was a black screen with a blinking cursors, but then my harddrive started ticking and vrooom, I was greeted by the new GDM login-screen. It’s quite purple, and while it’s pretty I think the dark chocolate of Karmic was a bit prettier. But booting went fine and it went quick, so it seems the priority to pull down the long boot-times has been a wise choice. HAL is completely gone now, and this is (as far as I can understand) one of the major contributions to the increased boot-speed.
I can’t say anything about the new UI changes, since my desktop looks and functions almost identical to before the upgrade. Same theme, same settings, same everything. Some minor keybindings had inexplicably changed, and some minor settings in window management, but a few clicks in the settings and it was back to normal.
Some minor griping is about this new idea that applications don’t appear in the notification area, but rather create their own icon/applet in the panel. Transmission for example would previously appear in the notification area, and required one click to open it and one click to tuck it back in. Now, with the new behaviour you require twice the amount of clicking to perform the same action since clicking will open a drop-down menu, THEN you click “Show transmission” and then the same to hide it again. Sure, you can hide it by clicking the close-button but it’s still inefficient and a bit obtuse in my opinion.
The volume control and Rhythmbox act the same way, imitating panel-applets rather than notification icons.
Thunderbird has been upgraded from the 2.x tree to the fairly new and shiny 3.0. That’s nice, even though I find a lot of the new Thunderbird a bit confusing. I do however like the non-existing toolbar, and just like Firefox it now sports an “awesomebar” instead. Quite nice. Thunderbird is definitely moving in the right direction and I feel zero incentive to change my mail-client.