Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 1 Review (Updated)

I downloaded and installed Lucid Lynx on my Dell Mini 9 today.

I installed the desktop edition first and the new interface is vastly improved over Ubuntu's old look. The Ubuntu splash screen has a simple, modern font and the dark, purple background reminds me a lot of Mac OS. The window buttons (close, minimize, maximize) have been moved to the left corner instead of the right. This also seems like it could be an attempt to copy OS X, but I think it was done because 9.04 added pop-up notifications. The notifications pop up in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, so it seems practical to move the window buttons to the left side.

The interface was very impressive on the desktop edition, but I only played with it for a few minutes before installing the netbook edition instead. I've had problems in the past with running out of space on my little 16GB SSD, so I thought I would go with the netbook edition to see if it helps me save any space. 

It seems like Lucid already supports more hardware out of box than Karmic did. It found my wireless drivers immediately. With Karmic I had to do a few extra steps to get the wireless drivers installed. I had heard that the netbook edition was going to drop OpenOffice for Google Docs to save space. However, OpenOffice came with the beta, which was a little disappointing. I was attracted by the idea that they wanted to save space for netbooks.

Social networks are built into the Ubuntu interface through Gwibber Social Client. Just like Empathy and Pidgin have been built into Ubuntu interface for a while - using the indicator applet to notify you of conversation notifications and allowing you to set your status - now you can update Twitter, Digg and Facebook, to name a few, all from the desktop.

Yahoo, not Google, is now the default search engine in Firefox. The Yahoo search page is nice and clean. I won't see it again though, because I only used Firefox long enough to download Google Chrome.

Ubuntu One now has the music store and should be more stable now that it's been around for while.

Even though I'm running the beta, Lucid Lynx feels much more stable that Karmic did. The interface is beautiful with no bugs that I've seen so far. Over the next few months it seems like Ubuntu 10.04 is going to grow to be a nice, solid operating system for anyone who is interested in freeing themselves from the shackles of MS. This is a LTS (long term support) release of Ubuntu, so it will be around for 3 years.

Update: I installed Lucid on my desktop machine and it automatically found the correct resolution for my display. This never happened with Ubuntu 9.04 or 9.10. Very impressive.