Ubuntu 6.10—Edgy Eft—thoughts on upgrading from Dapper

Updated my dapper installation on my laptop to Edgy a while ago. It went well. I jotted down my impressions and installation steps:

• faster boot - 56 seconds from shutting down computer restart and logging in—probably 5-10 secs faster then with Dapper.
• added tomboy notes / sticky notes / system monitor - adjusted to have CPU/memory/network / battery monitor / force quit /
• wow, only 109 MB of ram used upon boot up. Huge difference — Dapper was always around 150 MB upon boot up

Programs Installed

• Adobe Acrobat 7.0
• Agave - color scheme creator
• Alien - converts RPMs to DEBs
• Amarok - best music player for Linux
• Beagle - desktop search
• Ethereal - now called wireshark — network sniffer
• Inkscape - vector drawing program
• Java SDK 5
• K3B - best Linux CD burning software
• LyX - WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editor. GUI for LATEX
• Scribus - excellent DTP (desktop publisher for Linux)
• VLC - Plays anything you throw at it.
• Webilder - downloads backgrounds from flickr and rotates them
• Wine - (Wine Is Not an Emulator)
• GFTP
• Bluefish

Firefox 2.0 is very cool - tab restore, search suggest/memory for google, individual tab delete. Seems to have eliminated memory leak — used to be that after a few hours of using firefox memory usage would be over 250 MBs now (depending on how many tabs are open) is much less ~ 100 MBs

So I like it. As some have commented Edgy isn’t so edgy (Also a comment about the lack of ‘edginess’ from an Ubuntu developer). It seems the changes from Hoary to Dapper were more dramatic. Changes were mostly subtle, tweaks here and there, improvements to programs etc. Linux and Ubuntu are at a stage of maturity that dramatic improvement are hard to pull off. A math analogy, if you add 1 to 1 that is a 100% improvement. If you add 1 to 2 that is a 50% improvement. If you continue that on upward, adding 1 to 100 is only a 1% improvement. Linux is still making good progress just it is not as obvious now due to the substantial work already completed.

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