Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) Desktop Edition - Review

Quite the best thing Ubuntu have come up with yet. Observably faster and rather slick. On my desktop system, after the initial slow start to the live cd desktop, it installed quickly and shuts down much quicker than any other distro (slackware excepted). It doesn't start up any quicker but that's due to an "fsck failed - please run manually" message that halts the boot process. I had some problems on my laptop but that turned out to be some graphic card inconsistency that meant that compiz, which kicks in automatically as soon as the nvidia drivers are installed, wasn't drawing the window borders. Now sorted thanks to the Linux Mint forum.

I was pondering about writing about "the new Ubuntu" but the world certainly doesn't need another article that's nothing more than "here's how I installed the latest version of distro X". It's not exactly "a news story".

Ubuntu has come up a level or two in this release. Maturity and confidence now ooze from the screen.

Well done to all those responsible.

The last two weeks before release saw a lot of bug fixing on Launchpad which seems to have paid off. Hats off to the devs. The next release will be stability oriented.

> Ubuntu has come up a level or two in this release.

I moved from Ubuntu to Debian fully after Edgy was released, but started moving after I got tired of problems in Dapper. I didn't use Feisty much, but I've been playing with the beta and release candidate of Gutsy, and it appears that it really is a huge improvement. I'm going to see if there are still junk packages in the repositories that don't install.

I want to use two monitors and I can't get the nvidia driver installed in Debian Lenny. I'll consider moving back if Gutsy is as much of an improvement as it appears to be.

I'm still exploring it. It is noticeably faster than Fiesty. However, it's not a patch on Archlinux or Gentoo when it comes to speed.

I imagine it's a great newbie distro if you've got "mainstream" hardware viz. ATi, nVidia or Intel. It's very poor on my VIA box - fuzzy fonts and a 'shimmering' screen akin to microscopic Mexican waves going from right to left.

That said, I like it. I'll just have to compile the openchrome driver for my CN400 to get rid of the Gutsy Glitch.

Quoting:I want to use two monitors and I can't get the nvidia driver installed in Debian Lenny.

No suprise there. Lenny is testing/unstable. It hasn't been very long since Etch came out(*) so the adage of "Debian testing being as stable as other distribution's stable releases" doesn't apply now. Etch took quite a while to settle so many packages have been waiting in Debian experimental. They all hit Lenny at once when Etch was released as stable.

Give Debian Etch a try instead. Nvidia worked flawlessly on my Etch boxes.

(*) Very long in "Debian time" that is