I've been trying out (Gnome) Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) Alpha 3. Here are some notable changes:
-It boots up extremely fast in VirtualBox 3.1.4.
-The highly technical Xsane image scanner has been replaced with "Simple Scan," developed by Canonical. I say this is definitely a good idea.
-There are now only 6 games included by default. I read one user story where a grandma was amazed to see all the awesome Gnome games included by default.
-You can update the installer (during the installer wizard.) If this can increase the changes that ubuntu will install, it sounds awesome.
-No more installer option to participate in the package popularity survey. You can enable it under the synaptic options.
-Virtualbox guest editions, both Lucid's 3.1.2 OSE ones and the official 3.1.4 proprietary ones, cause the mouse cursor to not be shown.
-Browsing my (always difficult to browse) network is either not working or extremely slow.
-The new Palimpsest Disk Utility 2.29 version seems nice, but it doesn't work with an 800x600 screen.
-I'll have to try out the included pitivi video editor. I like the idea of including a simple video editor by default. I wish I didn't have to install the whole windows live package to install windows movie maker on Windows 7.
-Although tsclient is still the default RDP front-end/client, I am glad that Remmina is in the repos. It is a great gnome RDP (and other remote desktop implementations) client. However, it should not default to 256 colors (8-bit color.)
-System Testing didn't work. I contributed to a bug report.
If you want to try this ALPHA on something non-critical (like a VirtualBox test machine,) you can download it here:
Remember that we are past the feature freeze, so it will only get more stable from here until its release on April 29th.
