Dell XPS1530 and Ubuntu 10.04

With the recent release of Ubuntu 10.04, I knew it would just be a matter of time before I upgraded my current installation from 9.10 to 10.4. The question was just always when.

Yesterday I finally went ahead and upgraded. For some reason, the whole process took forever but it did finish and I'm now the happy user of Ubuntu 10.04.

People always want to know what you think. Do I like it, do I hate it, can things be better? In all fairness, I've used it less than six hours so I can't give a very good perspective at the moment. However, at first glance, there are several things that I really do like.

• The new theme, Radiance, is great. Although I've never disliked the previous, darker and more brown themes, Radiance is a breath of fresh air and makes everything look so much more light and inviting.
• Indicator applet - the new indicator applet which is integrated with various IM and social networks is great. I use Facebook, Twitter and all those quite a bit and having this all integrated will make that so much easier. I'm not so sure how I feel about Gwibber yet and it's tight integration into the OS but it's not a bad client. I've been using Tweetdeck for the last few months so time will tell whether I'll stick with Gwibber or not.
• Boot times seem to be improved as well and that's always a plus.

The only problem I had was that networking was disabled by default for some silly reason. I enabled it through the icon and it's worked ever since.

So far, those are my initial impressions. I may have more to say as I get used to the new features but I'll give that another week or so.

Until then, if you don't have Ubuntu 10.04, you should really get it. Go to http://www.ubuntu.com