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

Having written a review of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Beta 1 last week, I decided to just do a quick recap of Beta 2. Some things have changed, some things haven’t. It is understandable that this close to a final release there were no major changes. Feature freeze is almost here, after all.

Looks

Not much have changed here save for the arrangement of the window buttons.

The order is now CLOSE, MINIMIZE and MAXIMIZE where previously the order was MAXIMIZE, MINIMIZE and CLOSE. The theme colors and overall look is exactly the same as before.

Search Engine

The default search engine has been changed back to Google. Of note, however, is that when you change your search engine on the top right in FireFox search provider your homepage changes accordingly. This is limited to Google/Yahoo! at the moment. I am not sure if that will change for following releases.

Boot Time

As I thought, the boot time has improved from 31.79 seconds down to 25.82 seconds. Still not the sub 24 seconds that Kubuntu Beta 1 sported, but still an improvement. I wonder if it will improve more on final release. Note that I measure this from the moment I hit enter until the time that the login menu appears.

Memory Use

Memory use has improved somewhat as well.

quintin@druif:~$ free -m
total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1970        806       1164          0         39        314
-/+ buffers/cache:        452       1518
Swap:         1906          0       1906
quintin@druif:~$

That is a solid 153mb imrovement.

Gnome 2.30!

Beta 2 breaks the mold of Gnome 2.30, the final v2 release of Gnome. It might have a lot to do with the better memory management and maybe even the shorter boot time. In any case Lucid feels ever more responsive and snappy.

Summary

Overall Lucid Lynx Beta 2 is an improvement over Beta 1. This is expected. I for one am certainly looking forward to the final release!

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