bobafred

I went ahead and installed the Gutsy Gibbon Beta tonight. So far, so good. Upgrade info can be found here and release info here.

Initial thoughts:

• The Compiz Fusion stuff is pretty cool. To minimize system resource drain, I’m not using all the fanciness that it has to offer. The new alt + tab interface is nice, though.
• Gnome gets updated to 2.20. Whatever version of Gnome I was running before had this annoying problem where the items in the toolbar (panel) at the bottom would resize based on the title of the application. So, if you were looking at a webpage that had a crazy long title, the Firefox button would take up a large portion of the bar. That is fixed in 2.20.
• NTFS writing is available with the help of the NTFS-3G project. This is pretty huge if you have a bunch of old Windows partitions lying around. I already had this setup on Feisty, but still, nice addition.

The upgrade was cake. Not only do I have a fresh OS, but a lot of other apps were updated too. Nice.

Hopefully, things will continue to go well and I’ll coast into the final release, which is due in October.