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I tried it at alpha2 (about 2 weeks ago) and while i cannot say i was pleased with the experience (some parts like dash were still missing at the time) it was surprisinlgy stable (more stable than 10.10 at least).

I'm not Christian, but enough people are Christian for the Good Friday/Easter weekend to be a long weekend. I don't know about you, but I plan trips and such on long weekends.

I figure, I spend so many of my regular weekends trying to avoid but still ultimately working, I ought to enjoy the extended weekends as much as I can.

On the other hand, this could possibly explain why I have always had a better experience with .10 releases than .04 releases.

[q]I'm not Christian, but enough people are Christian for the Good Friday/Easter weekend to be a long weekend. I don't know about you, but I plan trips and such on long weekends.[/q

Indeed, the Easter holidays are public holidays in most of the 'western' world - guess where most Ubuntu staff, contributors and users live? In addition to Easter, in the UK we also have the royal wedding and May holidays the weekend after Easter. This could all potentially play havoc with their release schedule. It is a little worrying that they only realised that it might be a problem now.

With regard Fusion's point about *.04 release being near easter, the deadline for the *.04 release (i.e. the end of April) has never occurred this close to Easter before (i.e. in the life of Ubuntu) and won't do again until 2038.

No. I said on, around or during the <BOLD> beta, RC, or release </BOLD> date<U>s</u> of **.04 since Feisty Fawn... meaning that span of dates between March and April ('near easter') where these various development milestone ISOs are distributed. Previous betas/RCs have crossed tightly with Easter in the past.

In fact, they are not even delaying the final release date. I was simply making a (very *tongue-in-cheek*) point that proximity to Easter has never before been used to justify demoting and/or delaying any development milestone in the past... it's silly.

They've slipped since 5.04 but that hasn't really changed much as far as popularity is concerned.

Sometimes it's like they've picked a Debian snapshot right when bugs are at a peak.

Depends on the hardware you got I guess, but for my laptop which carries an Intel GM whatever graphics card, that's definately true.

All I hear are excuses and I have to deal with crappy boot time options, etc just to start the darn thing up.

Slip in Fedora and it works straight away.

No I think it has always been overrated.

The improvements in hardware compatibility come from the kernel, not Ubuntu.

I haven't noticed that at all. Indeed, 10.10 was the most stable and polished release I've seen yet. No crashes, freezes, configuration problems, noticeable bugs, or anything - not a hiccup.

With 11.04, the big issue is the Unity interface which is indeed a major change. I played with an alpha-2 live CD, but haven't installed it yet, so I haven't used it enough yet to decide if I like Unity or not. However, I currently run the Lubuntu desktop on 10.10, so Unity is of no great importance to me personally. If you're a Unity hater, all you've go to do is type...

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

You've also got the option for xubuntu-desktop or kubuntu-desktop. You can even install Gnome as a desktop. So I think people are making too much out of this Unity-as-default issue. But if it's a big deal, there are always other distros.

To listen to all the bitter complaining, you'd think people were actually paying for their freely-downloaded Ubuntu CDs.

Edited 2011-02-14 02:26 UTC

If 10.10 is so brilliant:-
Why have a number of Ubuntu die hards I know gone back to the world of Stability that is Debian? Several of them had Dell & Lenovo laptops that didn't boot after grub2 was installed.

This Ubuntu fanboism does not affect me as I run Fedora or CentOS so my opinion is from a casual observer.
I think that Canonical try too hard to make things 'default' before they are really ready.
The Fedora team get a lot of flack for pulling stuff just prior to release but personally that is the right way to go. Be brave, stand up and say it ain't ready yet and pull that bit of functionality.

I am beginning to think that linus die hard fans are alway unhappy any distro. People complain abou everything:
if it's easy... it's made for those who want it easy
if it's hard... it's made for pros
if it's backwards compatible... it's not enough modern or slick or feature-bloated cuz they don't implement new stuff
if it's not backwards compatible... it's a mess or unstable cuz they implemented new stuff
if it has options... it's got too many options
if it doesn't have options... it doesn't have options

you get the point right?
and then there are those who claim personal statistics as world facts "why do i know ppl that leave ubuntu?" and I know many people who can't even use the mouse properly (namely half of my church) that use ubuntu since 6.06 (with some of my help) and are still using Linux without having a phd...
and that is ubuntu's merit...

yes... even if it's not perfect... it HAS merits

I dunno, but Kubuntu gets better each release.



I'm pretty sure that an RC wouldnt change the state of Unity or Ubuntu's direction.

With the state of KDE4, it couldn't really get worse!!*


* [Dons flame proof underwear] That was just a joke, incase it is not obvious. I am sure someone was bound to say it, so it may as well be me. BTW, I am very happy KDE user and I am typing this on Kubuntu 10.10.

I am also typing this happily on Kubuntu 10.10 :-).

It's easy to be king when there's no one else even trying.