Ubuntu Edgy Eft... Wow

The official release will probably be October 26.
Yep, it's like just yesterday that I was obsessed with Dapper.
Actually, I still am, but it was released 6 months ago.
6 months per major release schedules are great :)

Anyway, Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Amazing.

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=3993036491329342354&q=edgy+eft

I believe that Edgy - in many fields - defeats the other major operating systems out of the box. No need for that to initiate a flame war, though. You'll see. You'll see. (You'll be screaming with delight 6 minutes in, too).

Many improvements since Dapper with default applications, such as a Wiki-ish note-taking application and a new Add/Remove programs system which:
-Automatically gets package descriptions translated to your native language via Rosetta (if only English wasn't my native language :( )
-Has a package ranking feature, which uses statistics gathered from particular machines (your choice, statistic gathering is not on by default) to suggest packages worth downloading
-Is, as always, just plain awesome

Many graphical enhancements, it's more stable, and other little cool things like the extremely informative and useful battery monitor.
Of course, all the default software is beautifully integrated.

Here's more:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyEft/Beta


I'm not sure, but I think they may have improved the update manager to sort updates into a tree-view as system updates, user software updates, etc. as well as to be more careful with not deleting old packages unless it's really necessary.
I could be very wrong about that, though, since I have only seen a little feature description on it so far.


The only thing I found a bit imperfect was the complexity of the translation thing using Rosetta, but I have strong expectations that it will get better.
I'm hoping in the future that translations could be done entirely in a GUI without having to open a web browser (the amount of stuff required to do it seems a bit intimidating, so it would become a much more powerful tool if anyone could and would use it in 5 minutes).
It would be even more cool if it could fall back to computer translations via Google or some such, which I suspect could actually be done without changing the client code...

It was unfortunate to learn that the awesome search indexer (Beagle?) which they showed off wasn't included out of the box, but the launch bar looks good enough for general use.
...And it isn't hard to install it, anyway :)


It is simply amazing how they managed this.
Not only is Ubuntu practically caught up with Mac OS and Windows, but they've actually got fresh innovation in here!

Looks pretty sweet, I really like how they brought everything together with a slick, consistent, smooth user theme. Pitty the video has no sound :/

I think they've worked on the sound a bit.
Not sure where I learned that, though, and the computer I've been running Edgy on for a few hours has no speakers...

I never have been fond of Ubuntu's sound work, but Edgy is really bringing it to a more consistent, clean, slim looking design so I'm hoping they've changed the sound stuff to reflect that.
Dapper, as some may have noticed, sounds a bit like Monkey Island :P

Hmm, well, how long until Dapper Drake is rendered obsolete? I know that 5.10 is already obsolete, but I can't remember how long Ubuntu would let you update your current distro before switching off to a brand new version, I knew there was something that they said about that one.

A good number of years, actually.
Dapper was tagged as having long term support, because it was a very stable release. (Except that mess of an update which they thankfully cleaned up nice and quickly).

Edit:
5 years for servers... I think 3 for desktop.



Hehe...
I love the totally broken demonstration of Compiz at the end of that video.
I have seen a bit of Compiz lately, and, when it works, it is amazing. It doesn't work on Intel's horrible integrated chips, though.
It has superior eye candy to Vista and OSX (if we forget how unfun it is to get going), including a really cool stretchy windows feel.
Instead of Vista's style of glass windows, they're more like thin plastic; lots of funny bending and flopping and flexing effects happening, as well as the nice drop shadows and blurry transparency stuff.
It gives the desktop a very lively feel and completely destroys productivity. Instead of coding, you'll be playing with windows :)

Ahh, great. Seems like that'll be on my notebook for plenty of years to come, I'm quite sure. Nice to have dual-booted that with Win XP Pro over the past few months. Shouldn't be any trouble, just hoping that in another year or two, I'll be considering Vista and Ubuntu 7.0 by then, with an AMD processor, hopefully.

hmm, I've tried a few distros and the only one I stayed with for any long period of time was Ubuntu. Maybe I'll dual boot it on my laptop this weekend to give linux another whirl.