Ubuntu 7.10: Early Impressions

I downloaded beta of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon yesterday. Wow! That’s the only word comes to my mind after having a look at latest version. This version is much changed from the 7.04 (although I wasn’t expecting much from this release). This release has few very good features, to start a few:

• Installation wizard has provision to migrate existing users data. This feature is just brilliant! Now, I don’t need to rush through my installation and create a backup before I want to try next version of my favourite operating system!
• Display configuration comes now in very user friendly screen. I always faced problems with connecting and extending the second screen to the display configuration. I used to screw up something every time (… I know I’m dumb but isn’t why the operating systems are there in the first place). This screen will allow us to change the display configuration in predictive way and easily.
• Restricted driver support for the nVidia, ATI and other devices. For the first time, I installed these restricted drivers as another package! To make my joy multi fold, Ubuntu by itself detected the driver and a nice pop-up comes near the clock informing about the restricted drivers. Very user friendly.
• Faster boot and response time. The memory footprint is also very less (~200 MB on my laptop with 1 GB RAM).
• GNOME 2.2 is just better than previous versions. My early impressions are very nice about this. No crashes so far. Seems to be stable and neat! I hope this impression continues for longer time.
• Network configuration just became simpler. For my needs to switch between wireless networks, office, VPN and home networks was seamless. For the first time I was prompted to enter the necessary authentication and later on it’s doing on its own! This has reduced my all pain to pay attention to my network connections. Kudos to Ubuntu team and developers, job well done!
• Not the last but for eye-candy lovers (including me) Compiz fusion is just superb. The default set of effects implemented are very nice and lightweight. All the effect options are available in user friendly screen and you can very easily turn them on and off.

… and one more important thing. I could manage to install Lotus notes on my Ubuntu. Now the last reason why I was dependent on Windows is also gone and I can happily keep only one operating system in laptop (not to mention that will be ubuntu)!