After about a week of using the Hardy Heron in-toto, I thought it may be time to chime in with some impressions.

Firstly, this is opinion, based upon my system, my settings, my eyeballs; YMMV.

The beta version was pretty good. A bit rough around the edges, as you'd expect. Almost as fast as Gutsy in general operation, although the Firefox Beta was faster. Gnome had a lot of little niggles that had been ironed out, and was looking very pretty indeed, especially with Compiz Fusion.

Avant Window Navigator would work sometimes, not others, and was really irritating in it consistency. If you close an app from it it would often crash AWN. No matter, I understand that it is very alpha level, it is just that it is often used in screenshots showing how good Ubuntu can look. In my books that's false advertising.

Onto The full 8.04, and I am finding the system a lot slower. It often spends time chewing on the processor, and it varies as to what is causing this; sometimes flash in Firefox, sometimes Pidgin, sometimes Inkscape(which is terribly slow now). The display often spends some time sitting there in "I need a root password charcoal silkscreen" mode before breaking up as I awaken it with new windows rolling across the screen.

Thunderbird, my email app of choice, doesn't want to handle common extensions properly, so I've got to save to Desktop, then open. I'm sure there's a fix for this somewhere, but it Just Worked in every other version.

I am delighted with the general stability of the eye-candy department. Compiz Fusion and Emerald themes rock. The bug in nVidia's drivers forced me to load their latest driver to avoid a bad case of "pink-shadow-itis". This is going to be a hassle with the next update of kernel, as it will need ot recompile the nVidia driver. Ah well, kind of used to that, and this isn't Ubuntu's fault. nVidia needs to open up their driver, so that the kernel dudes can get it working proper-like.

Going to Twinview, with two 19" Philips LCDs has been a real boon, and is easy to set up in the nVidia settings applet. What doesn't happen tho', is that the applet opens with su- privileges to be able to write back to xorg.conf. It is still easier in XP to change the display settings.

OpenOffice 2.40 is pretty good, not noticeably different to 2.3, however.

GTK applications running through the Gnome virtual file system are helpful. This is when I want to open a file on my blog site for editing, and save it back there. gEdit finally gets that ability, albeit in the first instance you can use Nautilus to find the file at the remote FTP, right-click, Open with Text Editor, then alter it, and then File-Save as, to push it back to the already-bookmarked FTP site and folder. After the Save-as, it will accept straight Save. Kate (the KDE advanced text editor) has done this for ages. Gimp also works in this manner. Inkscape looks like it's going to then throws a crash.

The new Remote Desktop Viewer, Vinagre, is good, quick and easy, but would be much better if it did more than just VNC. I still need the Terminal Services Client.

I loaded IE6+7 thru the IES4Linux, but they are suckily slow. It is faster to go into Virtualbox to test webpages.

I've used Brasero a couple of times, which was very easy, but may still load K3B when I have a more fidly CD/DVD creation task.

Konqueror 4 is pretty, but not highly functional without the usual plethora of plugins required for websites. It's also slow. And tends to stick on the charcoal screen of "wait for me, i'm thinking" a lot.

All-in-all it's a mixed bag. I don't think that it's currently LTS material, but as the patches come thru it will be good. The interesting thing is that this business model ( release before ready then fix up afterwards ) is one that has worked for many years for that big software company you all know and love ;-D It grates on the purist in me. So much so that I'm about to try another distro, ArchLinux-64. I will stick with Ubuntu and its variants for some time yet, as I love the ease of administration that you get with APT, and the up-to-date packages.