Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope: Impressions

Less than a week after the release of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope I am now running it on 2 machines. The first, a laptop, was an upgrade. The second, a clean install on my main home machine.

First my impressions:
This is (so far) the best release of Ubuntu that I've used.

As I indicated, I upgraded to Jaunty on a laptop first. It was a pretty clean system to start with, being a month old Intrepid installation without much customization. I did the upgrade the day of the release, using the update manager to pull the upgrade over the internet. It took a few hours, but it completed, and installed without any issues. This was refreshing, considering my last go-round with this sort of stuff.

The Laptop just sort of felt... slick. It is hard to explain. Like the Matrix, you can't explain it you just have to experience it yourself... Oh, wait, you can explain the Matrix. OK, well let me try to explain Jaunty's slickness. The first thing I noticed is the notifications have been unified, and fade out fancily. This may seem trivial, but when put together with the snappy response times, smoother graphics, and better art, it all leads to a more solid feel for the OS. While I generally rail against this sort of thing (my vista installs generally look and feel more like windows 2000) A slicker experience does lead to higher overall satisfaction.

This general sense of slickness made me decide to get Jaunty on my main machine.
This is where I would really get my real first impressions of Jaunty. I use this machine all the time. I had already decided to do a fresh install on the old workhorse, so I backed up my profile, deleted my profile and installed a clean fresh Jaunty.

The installation has been superficially changed, with new graphics, but runs essentially the same as in recent versions.

Now, maybe it is the fact that this is the first clean install I've done on this machine in a few versions, but this version is VERY solid. It fixed many of my previous issues, and everything just sort of works. Not that it did not work before, but of all the ubuntu installs I've done, this one went from install to "pretty much done" quicker than any I can think of. None of the BS that came with intrepid. So far I'm very happy with this version. I will post my setup log/fixes soon.