Ubuntu 8.04
So, I decided to upgrade to 8.04, from 7.10, and to also move to 64bit. Went with a clean install, mostly to eradicate all the weird things I had done with my previous profile.
Anyway, thus far it’s great. Firefox 3 Beta 5 is the default browser, and it mostly works very well. Fonts look a lot nicer in it. I didn’t even realize how crapulent they really were before until seeing the new renderer. I like the unlock mechanism for control panels, even if it did take me a few minutes to notice what was going on. The idea of Gnome VFS is nice, but we’ll see.
There are some issues I’ve had. One is that while copying things my open apps would hang in time rather frequently. I can only imagine that’s because of something in the VFS system. I’m hoping it was a fluke, due to some indexing going on, or will be patched soon. Moving files, however, is lightning fast, even compared to regular linux cases. This says quite a bit, since linux just changes pointers on the filesystem when a “move” is made, making the normal operation rather fast already. Skype is still a bunch of slackers, with not 64 bit version to show. Undoubtedly we’ll have to wait through 6 revisions of the Windows client before another update worth a damn shows up. From a straight architecture point of view, memory intense apps, like Virtualbox virtual machines, run a lot faster than before. I’m not sure why this is, since I only have 2GB of RAM, plus whatever is on my video card, but it’s nice.
So, thus far, thumbs up.