Sorry for the lateness of “Linux Wednesday”, been busy with school work and the release of Gfire 0.7.0 (its now out, gfire.edhewitt.co.uk). This week, I am going to do my review on the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 Hardy Heron. This release is meant to be the most substantial release of Ubuntu ever, plus it has Long Term support, of 3 years on desktop & 5 years on server.

I upgraded to 8.04 from 7.10 on Wednesday, the day before the release to “beat the crowds”. It downloaded and installed fine, until I reached the cleanup part, network manager would not shut down, so the updater crashed. I restarted my computer, and found that the install did work. I had successful install Xubuntu 8.04. I spent the next 2 hours clearing out all the old packages. So far, not a great start.

As I spent the rest of the night looking around 8.04, I noticed that for the end-user not a lot has really changed. There was really no new features, unlike 7.10. There was of course, all the latest versions of application, including FireFox 3, which runs really quick on my computer. But apart from that, for the average user there is not a lot to get excited about. Although, we have been told a bunch of new features will come with 8.10. However, I was impressed that see that my computer was slightly faster and I now get more fps when doing glxgears. Although, I think there is memory leakage. I think Ubuntu 8.04 does not utilise RAM very well, but this maybe fixed in 8.04.1.

Overall, not a lot to say about 8.04. Its good that we have another LTS release, which i will make Ubuntu very stable and secure. It is now easier for Windows users to try Ubuntu, thanks to Wubi. If you are still on 7.10, I would upgrade to 8.04 just for the newest versions of applications and the LTS support. If you are on 6.06, deferentially upgrade, you will see a huge change with your Ubuntu desktop, since you will experience all the new features which was on 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10.