Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” (Alpha 6): First Impressions

“One of the generally accepted rules of computing seems to be
that if you retain the same hardware and upgrade the operating
system, then you can expect it to run slower. For example, Windows
XP runs pretty well on my laptop, but Vista would be barely
useable.

“This seems to have been accepted as a fact of computing. But
noone seems to have told the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
community. They clearly don’t subscribe to this idea!

“Ubuntu 8.10 ‘Intrepid Ibex’ Alpha 6 absolutely flies on my
laptop. It boots faster and generally feels more responsive than
the 8.04 version, which again felt faster than 7.10 and 7.04.

“At the same time, I have a lot more applets loading on startup
(and software installed generally) in 8.04, so I will be interested
to see what happens when I enable them in 8.10. I suspect that
things will just be faster in 8.10 anyway as the quality of FOSS
just keeps increasing.

Complete
Story