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I gave the new Ubuntu 9.10 Beta a try today and I have to say, I’m mostly impressed this time.

The Ubuntu desktop with one of the new backgrounds.

The first thing you’ll recognize when booting the Karmic Koala is it’s new design. This covers many aspects starting at the boot splash and continuing on the desktop with a refurbished “Human” GTK theme and the gorgeous new icon theme “Humanity”. I wasn’t really a fan of the old “Human” icon theme but this one actually looks so beautiful, I instantly had to install it on my other computer running Arch Linux.
Nautilus now shows special icons for some of the folders in your home directory like the Pictures folder, which is a nice touch.

One thing that really scared me to death was the startup sound when the GNOME desktop comes up because the default volume on the Live CD is way too loud. It even makes the speakers of my laptop overamplify.

One thing that really bugs me, is that the “one tool for the job”-philosophy seems to be gone. There are now three tools to install software packages from the repositories, the classic Synaptic, the Add/Remove Software from the Applications menu (which moved to the System menu) and the new Ubuntu Software Center that took it’s place.

The home folder with custom icons for special folders.

Unfortunately none of these is really perfect and I would say the Software Center doesn’t bring any new features, but still misses a lot of (the German) translation. The Update Manager seems to work with PolicyKit for authorization now, which is the right way to go.

In Ubuntu 9.10 Empathy will replace Pidgin as the default IM client. Even if Empathy and the Telepathy framework really excite me, I think it is not yet mature enough to be the default IM client. For example it doesn’t support OTR yet, which is an absolutely crucial feature for me. Empathy 2.28 comes with all new help content in the Mallard format. In screenshots I saw, this really looks like a big improvement. Sadly I couldn’t start it though. I’ll have to look, if there’s already a bug in Launchpad for this.

I liked the new bootsplash, which is pretty simple but very appealing. What I didn’t like was that when X starts, it has another splash. I think that’s incosistent and it would be nicer, if the X splash would match the first one. It would have also been great if they had included Plymouth, Fedora’s new bootsplash.

Karmic also contains Ubuntu One by default (I’m not sure, if it was in 9.04 already). One is a great tool but it also still has a long way to go to become as mature as competing tools. I don’t think it’s a wise decission to include it by default already. During my test I was not able to connect to the One servers, because they were down all day. It’s (German) translation is very incomplete still, like that of some other software in Karmic. But, as it still is a beta, this may well change till the final version.

Nice new Systray icons and Networkmanager overhaul.

I noticed, that Ubuntu One doesn’t show a Systray icon all the time any more, which was the case the last time, I tested it. I am a big fan of less noise in the Systray, that’s why I also liked that Empathy isn’t represented there anymore. Rhythmbox has still a tray icon by default, but that is easy to disable. When the icon is enabled though it also still behaves in the strange way, that it doesn’t quit when I close it’s window, which is really inconsistent and should be turned off by default.

All in all I think this will be a good release, but it’s still a bit rough around the edges. You should test it and provide feedback through Launchpad to make it even better! (Which is what I’ll do now)