Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 4 - Hardy Heron

[Dr. Z]

Sooo, I have given Ubuntu another chance to impress me after the disasters that were 7.04 and 7.10.

Downloaded and booted the LiveCD (veery slow mirrors for the download, it would seem). First impressions? They have the decent fonts installed by default - this means that there is no longer the frankly awful default pointer (the 8.04 one looks nice and crisp just like a windows pointer) and the fonts are VASTLY improved.

It is BLISTERINGLY fast - anyone who remembers the difference between 6.04 and 6.10 will liken the new boot time difference to that. Its staggeringly fast to boot, it boots faster than anything I have ever seen, ever - including my K800i, T-Mobile Compact II, iAudio X5 etc etc. We are talking less than 20s from me pressing my power button to the Gnome login screen. Seriously impressive.

I dont have an nVidia card (actually an Intel card, which has caused me problems in the past) but still my 1680x1050 resolution was discovered automatically, which is a big jump from the nonsense of previous versions I have had to endure.

Nautilus is horribly broken, but this isn't a surprise given the changes that have been made to the underlying systems.

I will report back some more on things I find that are good or bad, but so far I am reasonably impressed.

If you have a spare PC or the time for setting up a virtual machine, I would do it