The latest version of Ubuntu has hit, and lucky for me FTP Telecom in Viet Nam is mirroring. This means I was able to download and install in a pretty reasonable time.

How’s it look? So far, it’s rock solid. It recognized all of my hardware (Thinkpad T61 with nVIDIA card) out of the box. The install was painless–even resizing my Windows 7 partition worked. I’ve changed my Appearance settings to Dust as I prefer the darker widget look. It tends to focus my attention on the large fields I need to fill out… The look and feel are typical Ubuntu–very polished and smooth.

Of course, I did have to do a bunch of things like install the Adobe Flash plugin and decoders for MP3. Silly that, in this day, we still need to do this. I understand the reasoning but surely there’s some detente that can be reached.

Anyway, it’s great to be back in a pure Linux environment. When administering Linux systems, a Linux desktop really is the best tool for the job, at least for me. As good as tools like PuTTY are, they can’t compete with the efficiency I gain from just running at the command line.

Two big thumbs up to the Ubuntu crew for getting yet another release out the door.