It might be a bit early to review the latest stable Debian distribution before it actually goes stable. On the other hand, it's pretty much done. It hasn't crashed, the drivers work perfectly and with the exception of various stability fixes, it has all the software it's going to get.

Installation

One of the biggest new features since Debian 3.1 is the new graphical installer. Apparently it was thought that the text based installer would prove too intimidating for some users, that linux would be well served by having a friendly looking installer, I've always wondered about that line of reasoning since so few people even install Windows, at least Debian defaults to the vesa drivers, so the installer should work even on fairly new graphics cards.

There are however other changes, for example the 2.6 kernel is now default and xorg is being used instead of xfree86. This meanins that there are already guides available for installing aiglx on etch systems. However, odds are that most of the people using the 3.1 stable were using the 2.6 kernel with it anwyays, especially if they had even semi recent hardware to run it on.

Really beyond that the installation worked perfectly, on both systems, its's Debian, it works.

Usability

Beyond that, everything worked perfectly. Whereas in previous releases, I was required to compensate for the newness of my equipment, (manufactured after Debian's release date), this was unnecessary. Everything worked out of the box, even xorg, without needing to be configured.

Thanks to the new smp detection code in the later 2.6 series, you no longer need separate kernels in order to use more than one of your cores. Conversely, I believe you do need separate kernels to use over 768MB of RAM. It would seem the performance trade off wouldn't be worth the hassle of having to configure a new kernel after ever installation. On the other hand, the Debian developers disagree.

By default, the Debian kernel is configured at the default 250Hz but without the default pre-emptive code, this does not appear to hurt usability in any significant way, in other words, I didn't notice until I checked the default configuration file.

There is one annoying thing, Java didn't seem to handle properly. Azureus, the Java based bittorrent client crashed on every opportunity and the Java dependent Openoffice Database application performed in exactly the same way. Now that Java's source code has been released, we should be expecting better integration, however, it's likely that this was all set up some time before the release. We should be able to look forward to this stuff working properly in the next version, assuming that it's not worth the trouble to fix in this one. Rtorrent works as a fine substitute for Azureus, with the exception that it tends to drop downloaded data since the last start if the computer crashes.

Multimedia

All the sound drivers worked perfectly, either out of the box or after compiling ALSA from source and having it probe in at boot. Graphics drivers for the intel on the macbook also worked perfectly out of the box, nothing you can do about nvidia.

Once again, if you hope to watch plenty of movies, you'll need to get mplayer and probably the win32codecs off a multimedia repository. Totem, the default media player can handle dvd menus, but you still need the libdvdcss libraries to make them play. Fortunately, kmplayer is included in the 4.0 repositories, now being considerably more stable than it was a while ago. With kmplayer, mplayer actually has a half decent frontend.