So I am an Ubuntuphile. I could not resist installing Alpha 1 of Karmic Koala once it came out. I have had it running on a VM for a while, and overall it seems solid.

The first Alpha build is not that obviously different from the last Jaunty stable build. It looks the same, has the same apps, the same Firefox etc. Where it DOES differ slightly is under the skin.

It sports a new Kernel, the newest testing release of Gnome, and it has QT4.

I enjoyed playing around with it, I noticed that EXT4 is still only an option, and EXT3 is the default filesystem, and no BTRFS yet. I am not sure if BTRFS is available for testing yet – will have to find out.

So there you go – Karmic Koala, more of the same – for now at least.

They did not even break the promised new theme out of the shrink-wrap yet.

My Advice – if you are a developer and need to follow the development of Karmic closely for some reason; go for it.

If you are an Ubuntufile like I am and just curious, not much to see yet.

If you want to be cutting-edge and show of your shiny ‘buntu skillz – stay away: Alpha builds are prone to breakage, and you can rather go Jaunty-Proposed in the repo’s if you really must.

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