As most of you probably know I generally use Arch Linux, at least at home. Recently the Arch Linux developers decided to drop the support for the ATI Catalyst proprietary video driver and I happen to own a RadeonHD 2900PRO so I was not very happy about this decision. So I thought I might give Ubuntu another try and installed the latest and greatest version 9.04 hot off the press. Here are some quick thoughts of mine about that release.
The installer was very polished. No issues, no complaints. I’d like however to see someday the option to select packages in the default installer.
The boot time was fantastic. Great job, Ubuntu team. I was pleasantly surprised by it. The new artwork looked great as well. Especially the New Wave theme which I simply love(except the issues it has with non-native GTK applications such as firefox, thunderbird). I found the new OSD notifications system good, although it seemed pretty much stolen from OSX 
As Pablo Picasso once said – “Good artists create, great artists simply steal”
The default software selection was decent enough. And there are the rich Ubuntu repos in which you can find almost everything. No worries here.
PulseAudio with OSS is still problematic, but I guess this is to be expected since probably only X-Fi owners use OSS. Flash performance is terrible on the 64 bit version at least. Skype 64bit is buggy as well. This is no fault of the Ubuntu team however. Video performance was satisfactory with Catalyst, though Desktop Effects are still almost unusable with it in the long run.
The overall experience with the system has been overwhelmingly positive so far. I hope it’ll remain in the same general area. Stay tuned for further updates.
