Ubuntu 10.04 was a big, purple, welcome change from the previous releases. Finally, Ubuntu had reached a stage where polish became a primary concern. I was quite happy with it and had fully intended sticking with it, until a few days ago, when a mail popped into my inbox informing me that the new Maverick Meerkat was about to hit town. As I am completely unable to control myself when it comes to upgrading software, I changed my mind and upgraded to 10.10.

Installation

The DVD drive packed up on my PC some time ago, so I resorted to 10.04's Ubuntu's disk builder to make a bootable USB drive, which worked flawlessly. After a few I was ready to go, so I did a quick test boot of the USB drive to check out Ubuntu's hardware support. No problems were evident, so it was time to shut down, swap the old home HD for a new one (easier than backing up!) and start the installation process.

Booting the USB drive for the second time, I chlose the immediate install option and followed the prompts. Most of it looks very much the same, it's just been spruced up a little. One significant change I did notice is an interesting little checkbox on one of the installer forms that allowed Ubuntu to automatically install mp3 codecs and other non-open source packages. This has to be one of the more common complaints I hear about Ubuntu - the lack of support for common music and media file types of the box. Admittedly, it's not Ubuntu's fault that certain file formats are protected by patents and copyrights that make it potentially illegal for users to play their own media on their own equipment, but users really don't care about this. They want convenience above all else.

Another interesting change is that Ubuntu now appears to begin installing as soon as the partition details have been set, thereby speeding up the process. This of course screwed up my timing of the install, as I usually wait till after account details are entered to start the clock. In the end, the timing didn't matter anyway because I missed the end of the install as I wandered off to get a cup of coffee and it was had completed before I returned less than ten minutes later.

Real world use

The install off of a slow USB drive was fast, but the first boot was even more impressive. After the POST completed, I got to see a slightly improved loading splash for approximately five seconds, before the screen blacked out, then reappeared with my empty desktop on it. I am running this off of an SSD boot drive, the one I used for 10.04, and it's much faster than Lucid Lynx, so much so, it's almost pointless even trying to time the startup. Shutdowns are quick as well, coming in at under two seconds. The Ubuntu team (and whoever else might have been involved upstream) deserve a pat on the back for this effort.

As usual, the team have monkeyed around with the wallpaper, replacing the single colour purple background of 10.04 with a slightly modified purple background that has been smeared with subtle prismatic colour. Honesty, I don't find it offensive, nonetheless, I like it less than Lucid's default wallpaper. I suppose it could have been worse. Luckily, it's easy to change the desktop background and there's some eye-pleasing alternatives on offer, so it's no big deal.

Ubuntu is also sporting a new default font, featuring characters that are wider and chunkier than appeared in 10.04, making them easier to read, not that I had any problems before.

Many of the application packages have been updated as well, but Gimp has sadly been dropped from the default install. It's still in the repo's, so it's easy to put it back, but I really think it deserved it's place as part of the default desktop. It'd be far better to get rid of anything that uses Mono to make room for it. Speaking of which, Shotwell is the new photo manager, providing nearly the same level of functionality as F-Spot, but without the Mono baggage. Hopefully Tomboy will get dumped next time around, and gone with it will be Mono and the risk of an easy target for a Microsoft lawsuit, and maybe that'll make enough room to put Gimp back.

Work has been done on Software Center as well. It now features a tab that shows the installation history of new and upgraded packages, grouped by date. Apart from piecing together what I did during a late-night software installation frenzy (happens all the time!), this could be useful for tasks such as tracking down software updates that may have broken something in a previously working system (hopefully never happens!).

Trim support

When I moved to 10.04, I decided to upgrade to a SSD at the same time, despite Ubuntu 10.04 not having TRIM support. For nearly six months I ran Lucid TRIM-less, my system didn't complain. I didn't run out of space on the drive, boot times didn't slow over time, nor has the drive worn out. Bear in mind that I only have a 64GB SSD, and that I'm using it only for the root OS partition.

I've now formatted the same SSD and installed 10.10 on top of it and boot times are phenomenal, so it would appear, on the basis of my completely unscientific experience, that running my SSD without optimising or TRIM has had little effect on it, probably because I used it only for a boot drive and there was plenty of free space.

Ubuntu 10.10 uses a 2.6.35 kernel which has TRIM support, however, as yet, I've been unable to find out if it's enabled by default. It doesn't really affect me either way due to the way I'm using the SSD. If I however had a very expensive high capacity drive and was using it for my home folder, then I'd want to be sure it Ubuntu supported TRIM.

In summary

Ubuntu 10.10, otherwise known as, Maverick Meerkat is definitely the best Ubuntu release to date, however, it's more of a refinement of the changes that Lucid Lynx introduced, than a revolution. The improvements are there and they are noticeable (especially the boot speed), but for someone who is happy with Lucid, there's no compelling reason to upgrade. For new users, Maverick Meerkat is definitely the one to go for.