The installation took a normal time, similar to 9.10. The boot-up takes about 18 seconds, which is better than 9.10, but I'm curious if the final release will attend what Ubuntu promised, less than 10 seconds to boot. That would be a real performance and a big challenge for any OS developer.
On my Dell D610 laptop everything works out-of-the-box, including wi-fi. After the first boot the touchpad stopped responding, but, using the trackpoint I gave it a reboot and now it is working. There are some problems with the notifications, which appear in a strange way. View the following image to see how
What else I can tell you is that at a first look, the OS moves pretty fast, but the applications are crashing frequently and easily. I observed several flickers of the screen, so I guess it might be a problem with the driver of something like that.
Ubuntu 10.04 (so far, Alpha 2) comes with Empathy as a default internet messenger, Firefox 3.5.7 for brwsing, and OpenOffice 3.1 suite. There's also a new application included, named Pitivi Video Editor.
The 10.04 will be a LTS (long term support) distribution, so it should be an high stable release, which will be supported for 3 years for desktop edition, and 5 years for the server one. The LTS releases are launched every two years, while normal releases are launched every 6 months.
Here's the calendar of the Ubuntu 10.04 release schedule:
December 10th 2009 - Alpha 1January 14th 2010 - Alpha 2- February 25th 2010 - Alpha 3
- March 18th 2010 - Beta 1
- April 8th 2010 - Beta 2
- April 22nd 2010 - RC (Release Candidate)
- April 29th 2010 - Final Release.
For detailed schedule, go here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidReleaseSchedule?action=show&redirect=LucidLynxSchedule
Please consider that this is an unstable release ! Do NOT install it as your default OS, as it has frequent crashes that might cause you to lose data ! It is recommended for testing purposes only.
