It's good, it's very good. It's actually rather frightening. When installing Ubuntu it's generally very shiny and then a system-halting bug hits you like a Claymore mine buried in the bushes. A part of me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop however after a day of setting up the system and using it for daily tasks I have to admit that it does seem pretty much perfect.

Well it's not completely perfect. I despise the nit-picking because after all the perfection that's been crammed into this distribution, it almost seems heretical to actually complain about anything. But this review wouldn't be complete unless I was honest. So I'll start out by mentioning the VERY FEW things that did not work.

Problems

* I couldn't enable the restricted drivers, and therefore the 3D, until I'd updated my repositories. This actually makes perfect sense in retrospect, since they weren't on the cd and were probably in a separate repository. But this wouldn't make sense if you were using it for the first time.

* No flash by default. I still haven't bothered to install it.

* With full graphic extensions, windows do sometimes bounce beneath the edge of the screen. With this the panels dissapear from the task-bar and can't be brought back. I generally am forced to terminate them with the system manager or the kill button.

* No system wide application controller. The biggest thing I miss about OpenSUSE is the FTP, Squid, Http configuration, all from one interface. Granted it was slow, really slow and sometimes buggy, but I was reassured for having it there. That in and of itself would be a good reason to use OpenSUSE beyond other distributions. Is that enough to put it over Ubuntu? Well it depends on how comfortable you are configuring your system, Ubuntu makes the daily things far easier and is categorically faster, but intricate configuration is more of a bother.

That's really it, almost nothing.

Now the good bits, bear with me, I might miss something.

* The Distribution is Debian based.

This might seem like a niggling issue, after all, you don't use the package manager very often. However when you do, it does make a massive difference. Being able to install packages with one command from out of the box, as well as being able to use "apt-get dep-build <package>" to build all the dependencies required to compile a package (wine for example) or "apt-get dist-upgrade" to version-up your distribution to the next release. Although in truth, Ubuntu's been somewhat buggy about that in the past.

Really if you're planning to keep the system around for a while. Keep separate /home and / partitions, when you need to upgrade just nuke / and make a new one with the new Distribution. It's more trouble in the short run, but far more efficient overall.

Thanks to it's Debian ancestry, it took literally one command for me to pull in most of what I wanted from the beginning, "sudo apt-get install rtorrent gvim emacs liferea mplayer smplayer". I didn't even bother installing codecs till some hours later.

* Availability of desktop packages

Unlike RPM distributions, which require separate repositories to be installed before you can really use the home packages like torrent clients, mplayer and codecs. Ubuntu and for that matter Debian, include such repositories or (in Debian's case) have them accessible with one comment in the "sources.list" file. In Ubuntu's case, they provide a GUI to enable these repositories. It could be easier, but not unless you were willing to use a "Fischer Price" system.

* Less package conflicts

I really hated this in OpenSUSE, one of the worst things about it was that the additional repositories that you needed to install in order to make your system usable tended to have packages which conflicted with packages you already had on your system. This was often just a semantic problem, one package you'd never use conflicting with another feature you'd never use. Sometimes however it had an interesting bug, like the time installing Lyx messed up the fonts in wine to the point that I couldn't fix the problem even by recompiling from scratch.

In retrospect it seems obvious some libraries had overwritten other libraries, but they were completely different programs made for the same system. Presumably there is one other setup that's similar enough to mine that this problem wouldn't happen.

* The Shiny

Ratcheting the visual effects up to maximum is a compelling experience. Not just for having something to look at while the computer's working, or the aesthetic benefit of having calming lines while working. There is a practical side that non-responsive programs turn dark-gray when they're acting up. Rather than tearing the window; in addition, hardware redrawing saves slower applications like Firefox or Office from having to call redraw several times while you draw Pidgin windows across them.

The stability has gotten to the point where Beryl no longer crashes and does not interfere with movie playing applications.

* Latest Packages

It does use the latest packages, the version 3 beta of Firefox as well as 0.9.59 of Wine. Not the very latest, but pretty close. The issue is that this is a LTS and with Firefox and Wine going stable, to version 3 and 1.0 respectively, unless you back-port, you might be stuck with strangely performing software for a while. Not to mention the latest versions of Wine don't work properly with Command And Conquer 3. A fairly irritating issue although they have fixed the draw corruption issue in Guild Wars.

* Speed

It's certainly faster than OpenSUSE, in addition to not having the Libraries interlinked in such a strange way, Ubuntu doesn't have a beta version of Beagle running in the background. This might seem like a cruel jab at OpenSUSE, but seriously, what were they thinking.

I'll grant that Firefox is a massive memory hog if you leave it running, not least because it's a beta version. However in general the packages are fast and the system is very responsive.

* Design

It IS well designed, the default theme is nice and not a painful physical assault on the eyes like Sabayon, there's no "virtual fish" like some distributions I could mention. No loud, crippling startup sounds that everyone seems to think are necessary. It's really pleasant to use.

Overall

It's really good, would reccomend most thoroughly.