UPDATE: Reviews of the full versions are being posted, Ubuntu Lucid Review here.

Yes I have been busy this past weekend. I set myself a target of finishing three blog entries over the weekend, and this is the third, even if it is Thursday… Uhm, at least I think it is… anyhow, on to the topic at hand.

I decided to take a sneak peak into the future, to see what Ubuntu has in store for its upcoming release. Said sneak peak took form of installing Ubuntu 10.0.4 Lucid Lynx Beta 1.The next release of Ubuntu will be a LTS release. This means that it is supposed to be focused more on stability and usability than on innovative new features. Karmic was all about innovation, Lucid will be all about being desktop ready.

What was waiting for me?

First Impresssions

When reading about the upcoming Ubuntu release one feature kept being mentioned – time to boot. Karmic was no slouch, and Lucid promised to deliver even better boot times. Once I installed Lucid the first thing I did was boot my working Karmic install, and time it – 28.65 seconds from hitting enter at GRUB to login screen. (I agonized about rounding up to 29sec, or rounding down to 28.5sec… and eventually settled on simply reporting how it was timed.) Lucid did the dash in 31.78 seconds. More than three seconds slower. And no, for those of you wondering, I did not install the experimental bootup enhancements for Karmic that some people did.

I suspect that this will improve as the release gets finalized. On my hardware I am hoping for sub 25 seconds.

Enough about that.

One thing I immediately noticed was that Ubuntu Lucid is purple. Well being a dude I call it purple, a girl might describe a more fitting pastel violet or something. It is purple OK? Well maybe with a little pink thrown in here and there.

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The pretty boot animation that was present in Karmic is gone. It has been replaced with what I can only described as an Anime inspired logo and animated dots. It is certainly not ugly, but the Karmic boot animation was prettier.

Logging In and Tooling Around

Once you have logged in you will notice that the purple (it’s purple, okay?) theme prevails. One thing that was carried over from Karmic is the choice of a dark theme with light text for menus, panels and window borders. I like it. The wallpaper is pretty, and I felt at home. Ubuntu has certainly come along quite a bit from its orange/brown origins.

When you open your first program or window you will notice that the maximize, minimize and close buttons no longer reside at the top right of windows, but at the top left. The buttons are round, as is the case on MacOS. It certainly is a departure from the default Gnome themes.

Will this feature prevail into final release? I am guessing yes.

Yahoo! Or not

When you open Firefox, you will note that the default search engine is now Yahoo! search. I am surprised by this, and kinda disappointed. Expect a plethora of tutorials and workarounds for restoring the default Google search options. Notable in its absence is a method for choosing your default search provider. I read somewhere that this would be provided – in a later beta release maybe?

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Of note on the Homepage is a link to the “Ubuntu store.” Expect that to be expanded and pushed hard in this and future releases of Ubuntu.

The default search for entering a query in the address bar is still Google search, which is fine by me since I do 90% of my searches from there.

The Ubuntu Software Center

Debuted in Karmic, the Software Center is now expanded and refined. Expect to see Paid for applications and Music in the future. At the moment there is a “Canonical Partners” area, but right now the only software available is Adobe Flash Plugin 10 and Adobe Reader 9. In the Ubuntu store that can be visited via a link on the home page there are more paid for software offerings.

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Social Networking Inclusion

The inclusion of social networking services in the desktop has been big news, Ubuntu Lucid includes Gwibber by default, and this allows you to integrate a lot of social networking services into the desktop environment – you can Tweet from the user menu next to the shutdown button on the top panel, for instance. And you can use Gwibber to access your social networks and stay up to speed with your buddies as well. This is a nice new feature for Ubuntu, certain to be a crowd pleaser if it works well.

You can also add chat accounts to your top panel, and Facebook chat is available as well.

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Missing Applications

Gimp is gone. Yes for most it won’t be a big loss, but ironically I couldn’t resize the screenshots for this review to a sane size with Fspot, I could crop them, but I couldn’t find a resize function. If I missed it please enlighten me.

New Additions

I am very excited about Pitivi. For too long have I been looking for an alternative to Windows Movie Maker – I do simple things, and Pitivi fills that gap. Sure it is not up to the lofty standards set by the offerings from Apple, yet. I hope this feature will grow from strength to strength as time goes by.

General Notes

Lucid seems snappy, and stable for a Beta. I had absolutely no problems, which is telling when compared to my review of PC-BSD 8.0.

Lucid also uses very little RAM, look at the output of ‘free’ below, taken with Firefox and Gwibber running.

quintin@druif:~$ free -m
total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1970        959       1011          0         56        379
-/+ buffers/cache:        522       1447
Swap:         1906          0       1906

Also interesting is that you can FTP directly from Nautilus! Sure for this release Nautilus has some new features such as the option to open an extra pane, but to FTP from Nautilus is cool. I honestly don’t know if this is new to Lucid or not, I have never tried it, but it is nifty indeed. (Yes I know that Windows and KDE has had this feature for a while – can a guy get excited about a small thing?)

Summary

Lucid Lynx is an interesting release. It needs to conform to the high standards and polish of a Long Term Support release, yet it features some departures from the norm usually reserved for ‘normal’ releases. Will it be a success? I think so. It should build on the success of Ubuntu through the years. It certainly is good enough for me to start using it as a daily workhorse already.

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