Last weekend, it had been a few days since the latest Ubuntu hit the net and I hadn’t heard of any major upgrade SNAFUs so I decided to upgrade. I wanted to record my absolute first impressions without doing much, just to see how I felt.  The upgrade went by without anything bad happening.  My wireless connection still works and nothing major seems to have gone wrong.  I went through each of the things I’d heard hyped about in Ubuntu and checked to see how they had changed.

Two major Linux distributions will be making releases this month and since I use both of them, I’m pretty excited!  First up will be the Debian-derived Ubuntu. This distro has been the darling of users and Internet media alike for the past few years.  It stole the post from Mandriva, the previous Linux distro that everyone recommended to new users.  Although Mandriva was the easiest distro for new users, it also had a reputation for being so bleeding edge it was unstable.  Ubuntu, however, is very stable and tends to work on more hardware out of the “box”.  In fact, it was Ubuntu’s ability to work on laptops, long the Holy Grail of Linux distros, that led it to such prominence.  That is the main reason why I chose to install Ubuntu onto my laptop even though I’ve been a Fedora user since I first got into Linux about five years ago.  Ubuntu 4.08 aka Hardy Heron will be flapping its way to you on 24 April.