Yesterday those nice people over at Canonical put the final release version of u10.04LTS out into the wild for all us linux users to enjoy. I’ve been using it since the beta stage and the couple of development releases, then the RC have all been grand, and now the real, full fat version it sitting nicely in my virtualbox.
I have to say that I’m really enamoured with it. I started using linux distro’s – one or another – since u6.x and frankly the updates from there to version 9.x have really been under the hood. With u10.04 there’s been a massive overhaul of the UI, and I think it looks fantastic. Finally gone is all that brown, and it now comes back with a slick new orange and purple with hints of black and grey.
It’s too early in the morning to go into a full overview of what I think of this new version, but what I will say is that they’re pretty close to nailing it. I’ve only experienced one crash so far, but that’s to be expected when running it entirely in VM. I’ll be dual booting it so it can run natively and at full speed over the long weekend, so I’ll get back to you about what I think when it’s all up and running.
If only everything wasn’t so bloody big. If you’re not running high end equipment with nice high resolution monitors, you might get a little pissed off at who much screen space is wasted with all the dead areas that have always been built into the UI. Top bar with window toggles, then the menue bar, then big fat bars with controls, then actual application window space. It’s huge! If I was a better coder, or I had the time, then I’d write something better… but that’s just personal preference.
Seriously, look at all that wasted space! Great massive chunk of screen estate gobbled up with big swathes of nothing! Bad.
