They could have called it the Rushed Ram or Bugsy Bear, but instead its a fictional creature Jackalope. Ubuntu’s latest tries to bring some innovation to the table, after the intermediate Ibex, but unfortunately it doesn’t feel ready from day one. Ever since Mark Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu should be visually as cool as Mac OSX, I have been waiting for the Ubuntu release to deliver this – after all there are lots of smaller distros out there focusing on strong visual appeal.  It seems that we are still in the wait mode for this to happen, even after Jaunty’s release. Read on…

The most obvious improvements in this release are the notification system (see Shuttleworth’s blog) and improved boot speed. The notifications bring new uniform notifications of various system events for the end user, such as network connections/disconnects, volume changes from hot keys and so on. I see this as an improvement in terms of usability and visual appeal. The notes itself are somewhat dark in colors, perhaps to match some of the new themes better – on the other hand they don’t quite match with the classic Human theme which still is the default. The boot process on the other hand has really become faster – I did not clock the difference, but it is very noticeable. Also I have to give credit for the new Gnome login screen which actually looks good (and also has rather dark toned colors).

Speaking of visual appearance, Since Shuttleworth’s vision to improve the looks of Ubuntu, they have been releasing some darker themes. The Ibex introduced theme ‘Dark room’, and the Jaunty comes with ‘New wave’ and ‘Dust’ themes. Event though I have always hated the bizarre brown/orange theme of Ubuntu, I have to say that these new additions don’t really improve things. I don’t know what is it, but somehow they don’t feel complete or polished enough – the final touch is missing. And I also don’t understand that whats the obsession with rather dark color schemes? The new wallpaper, even though it should matter as it is easily changed, deserves a special recognition: It is the lamest Ubuntu wallpaper in a while. I quite liked the more artistic approach of Ibex’s or Hardy’s wallpaper, but this new one goes back to the Ubuntu tradition of delivering some kind of lame, meaningless, brown stripes on screen. Why is it so difficult for Ubuntu to make a polished looking release? The first impression is everything in attracting new Linux users.

However thing that most concerns me about this new release is that it seems to be contain some rather big showstopper grade bugs. My Thinkpad T41 using Jaunty acts very slow and the screen redraws seem to bring CPU load to 100%, making the whole system rather painful to use. Overall your mileage depends on your hardware, but I always find it surprising when some distro doesn’t correctly on this oldish laptop – that is because generally the Thinkpad’s are possibly the best supported laptops for Linux, and on the other hand this laptop has flawlessy worked on a HUGE number of distributions (for exp. all Ubuntu’s starting from Feisty), so it is always interesting when someone still manages to break the compatibility with this hardware. The CPU usage bug is reported by many, there seem to be a lot of problems with WLAN/WPA2 and more…you can track the bug squashing work by having a look at Launchpad.

Overall it is a typical Ubuntu release. Brings something new, but nothing ground breaking and is very similar to the previous relese. In this release the changes are perhaps more apparent than in the previous two (Hardy, Ibex).  The maturity to my eyes doesn’t seem as good as it was with the Ibex on day 1, so I would give it a few weeks to improve until installing or upgrading. I really don’t see why they stick with the 6 month release cycle as it obviously is too short to introduce anything significantly new, or to stabilize software. I find it somewhat paradoxical that actually the previous release Intrepid Ibex is now in it’s prime. But give Jaunty a month or two, and the huge  user base of Ubuntu will guarantee that the most common bugs are found and fixed, and Jaunty evolves into a nice stable release – just before Karmic Koala hits the servers…

If you can’t wait, you can grap it from Ubuntu.com