Ubuntu 10.04: Lucid Lynx

Now that the latest an greatest of current versions of Ubuntu is finally into its beta stage i thought i should give it a try. I heard and read a lot about it.So let’s see what’s true and what isn't.

As you can see the desktop is still familiar but the new “Computer” and “Trash” icon already look a lot more welcoming and are hopefully only a small taste of what’s to come until April 2010.

Many of the Menu-Icons are refreshed as well. What I like especially is the Wine-Icon.

Other than that the first impression doesn’t try to fool you into thinking that everything’s changed. It just seems like a worthy polish of what’s been there already.

 

Numerous services keep crashing on me all the time (and telling me so through an error-message) but I never realize what’s broken. Everything just works like I’d expect it to. The only thing that annoyed me was that the standard search provider of Firefox was now changed to Yahoo which I immediately had to change back to my own preference. Pidgin is once again the IM-client of choice for Canonical, which I welcome. I’ve been told that as of 10.04 the GIMP is no longer part of the standard Ubuntu installation, but since I only did an upgrade I cannot confirm that. If it’s true and there is no replacement for it I could understand that since not everybody needs a powerful photo manipulation software. As far as I know the GIMP binaries are pretty huge which doesn’t go well with an Ubuntu Installation-CD where size is still a factor.

Ubuntu 10.04 also has this nice Social Networking touch integrated into the Taskbar (or whatever the bar on top is called) now.

 

Networks like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr (although not all of them fully functional yet) can be integrated into this new Broadcasting app seen below that allows you to access all of your social networks at once and see what’s happening.

 
Of course there haven’t been any huge promises for 10.04 concerning the look-and-feel so I’m rather pleased with what I’m seeing there, assuming that the improvements don’t stop there. But there have been promises about functionality like faster booting and I didn’t see any improvement there yet. Let’s hope for the best that Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx will become a worthy re-release of one of the best Linux distributions out there.