Seeing as I've gone to the trouble of writing up my thoughts on the new Windows 7, it seemed only fair to do the same for Ubuntu, though this is more of a review since I've actually gotten to see more of the system than just the installation screen.

Ubuntu 9.10, otherwise known as Karmic Koala, is the latest release. Canonical produces a new version of Ubuntu every six months, and once every 18 months, a Long Term Support (LTS) version. Lucid Lynx will be the next LTS release, so Karmic Koala, although a complete desktop OS in it's own right, should be considered a preview of what is to be expected in April 2010.

Installation

The latest release was installed on my PC, wiping away the beta I'd been running for the last month or so. I'd never perform an in-place upgrade for a new release of any OS as that's just asking for trouble. Luckily, with Linux, a clean install is a reasonably trivial task, so long as you started with your home folder and boot partitions separated, allowing the OS to be overwritten, while keeping all your data and application settings safe in your home folder.

This installation process started with booting the live CD then partitioning and filling in the account details, which took about 5 minutes in total. Once this had been done, the installer took over and the PC was be left alone until it was ready to restart. I've so far performed four installs of different versions of Karmic, and none of them have taken longer than about 15 minutes on pretty average desktop hardware. Colour me impressed.

The first thing I did after the reboot was to execute apt-get on the command line to install all my usual apps: ubuntu-restricted extras, mozilla-thunderbird, the LAMP stack and VLC, all of which went on without any fuss, taking approximately 20 minutes over ADSL 2 from start to finish.

Finally, I used the Hardware Drivers dialog under System->Administration to put on the latest 185.18.36 release of the nVidia binary blob, which again worked flawlessly.

So there you have it, a clean install of Ubuntu, from scratch, back to my fully configured system with all the software I use in about 40 minutes.

Look

The boot process is now divided into two splash screens, the second of which rather reminds me of the Windows boot screen, especially since both Canonical and Microsoft seem to be going away from the concept of a progress bar, using a throbber instead. As I understand it, the first splash screen is leftover from the old boot splash program and will be removed in time for the next LTS in April next year, when Ubuntu shoots for the 10 second boot target.

The default theme has finally been updated, out with the orange and light brown of previous releases, and in with a more subdued chocolate brown. I quite like the new default desktop wallpaper too. It may be a bit plain, but I'm not a fan of busy backgrounds since it makes it too easy to lose your icons on the desktop. At least is isn't a coffee stain or just boring, dull, brown.

There's a lot of new icons, especially in the notification panel. Gone are the mix of icons styles, replaced with more professional looking, and unified icon set.

The most notable change in the menu system is that the Application->Games folder now has a sub-folder into which the logic puzzles have been grouped. I'm glad to see that as the menu was getting too big, making it hard to see the whole thing on small screens, like netbooks.

Performance

The system defiinitely boots faster. My current times, using bootchart, show that it should be taking about 30 seconds from grub to the desktop (autologin).

Once up and running, the general interface is very snappy, feeling faster than it was in Jaunty. I had actually been disappointed with the Ibex release of Ubuntu as it was getting pretty sluggish, especially with Firefox which was all but unusable on any javascript heavy web site (Slashdot, I'm looking at you). Jaunty made some pretty big steps forward, but I have to say that I am happy with the speed in Karmic.

Even Open Office opens pretty quickly, taking about 5 seconds after a fresh restart, but opening nearly instantly subsequently.

Firefox 3.5 is working great. I was running 3.5 in Jaunty, and it was pretty quick, lots quicker than 3.0, but under Karmic, 3.5 is very fast, specifically, when changing tabs or scrolling the window which is where my main performance gripe was in earlier versions. It's not quite up to Google Chromium standards, but it's close enough for me not to have any complaints.

I should also mention VMWare Player, which is running very quickly under Karmic. It was always pretty good once the VM had started, but I found in previous releases that startup and especially shutdown times were pretty poor. In Jaunty, VMWare Player would take up to 60 seconds to save the virtual machine state and close, and for the last 30 seconds the system would freeze. Under Karmic, opening and closing a virtual machine is incredibly quick, in the order of 10 seconds, and I have yet to see the performance of the rest of the system appreciably affected. Bear in mind that this is with the beta of VMWare Player 3, as prior versions won't install cleanly in Karmic, though there are straightforward workarounds.

Samba has improved this time round, I'm getting a full 1MB/s faster speeds copying files to my Karmic box, up from mid 7 MB/s range to the high 8 MB/s range. I've even seen 9MB/s on a couple of occasions, though performance did slowly drift to the high 8's for very large files. I've never seen Samba running anywhere near this fast on this hardware since I first installed Ubuntu on it back in the Hardy Heron 8.04 days.

New features

The new Software Center replaces Add/Remove Applications, and it is slightly more intuitive than it's predecessor, but it's not really ready for prime-time yet as it's missing some of the features of the old Add/Remove tool. Having said that, Software Center has one killer feature which shows you an overview of all the software you've got installed on your system. By the time the next Long Term Support release of Ubuntu is ready, Software Center should be full featured and a suitable replacement for it's predecesor. For now, Synaptic is still hiding in it's System->Administration folder, so all is well.

The applet panel on the upper toolbar has a new unified mail/messaging icon. I've yet to find a use for it though, as I use Thunderbird which isn't supported for now.

There's lots of other stuff under the hood but most of it doesn't impact day to day use of the PC, so I won't be going into detail on it.

Issues

An operating system is a complex beast, and like any other, Ubuntu has it's share. Canonical's brutal release schedule doesn't help this, but I have yet encountered any show-stopper problems.

The only somewhat serious problem would be that my Sony MRW-620-2AU6 internal multi card reader is causing errors, which is showing up as the boot process taking 30 seconds longer than it normally should. This wasn't happening prior to the beta, so it's obviously a regression. For now, I've simply unplugged the device as I've barely even used it since installing it on the PC a couple of years ago.

I'm also occasionally getting an ECC checksum crash about 30 seconds after logging in. This is merely a warning that my system isn't using ECC memory (it's correct, I don't have ECC memory) that the crash monitor is over-reacting to and logging it as a critical error. Apart from the pop-up crash message, there are no other symptoms, so it's quite harmless and can be ignored, though it's not a very reassuring way to greet new users.

Update 03/11/2009: A fix for the ECC checksum problem has been released into testing and should be available within a week.

The third problem I found is that I've been getting a loud pop noise every time a sound is played, cause by the audio hardware being put into sleep mode, resulting in a pop noise when the sound system is roused from it's slumber. It's annoying, but easy to fix, however, Ubuntu shouldn't be enabling audio power saving mode on a desktop box that is always plugged in to the power.

The fix for the audio problem is to comment out the last line of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

<pre class="brush: bash">
# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds
#options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
</pre>

The final issue is that Flash crashes approximately five minutes after the browser opens, resulting in a gray box where a YouTube video (or any Flash app) should be. This one has been recurring since 64 bit Ubuntu arrived on the scene, caused by nspluginwrapper which is supposed to be a method for getting 32bit Flash to work on 64 bit systems. Removing the package and installing the 64bit Flash player manually fixes it, but it'd be nice if Canonical dropped the 32bit hack because it's no longer needed.

To fix Flash, remove the packages flashplugin-installer, flashplugin-nonfree, and nspluginwrapper (if they are installed), then download the 64bit Flash player, extract libflashplayer.so, and copy it into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ where FireFox (and Opera) will be able to find it.

Conclusion

Despite this release not being a LTS release, I see it as a very significant step forward, offering something that Canonical has been promising, but not delivering, for the last couple of releases: user interface polish. The system is more responsive, but as usual, I wouldn't recommend installing it for most people for at least a week or two after it's been made available, giving the developers time to sort out any glitches that have sneaked in prior to the deadline. Think of it as equivalent to waiting for Service Pack 1, a common procedure on Windows, except we'll get it in a couple of weeks instead of a year.