Since we’re going to be needing to make some computing changes for the summer (moving our server needs to Rackspace Cloud, converting the now-server back to a desktop to replace Jennifer’s dying Eee), I decided to bite the bullet early and upgrade my laptop to the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx release candidate (release due out tomorrow).

On a whole, I like it. The new visual theme takes some getting used to, but it’s growing on me. Some elements of it are just gorgeous. Twitter and IM integration is nice too; it’s actually getting me off Psi. Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3 fully-supported are good to have as well.

It’s not without its problems. I needed to change my window manager button order (they moved the buttons to be more Mac-like, and the old Windows-based border is just too ingrained in my fingers) — do this by changing /apps/metacity/general/button_layout in GConf to “menu:minimize,maximize,close”.

The MeMenu is nice once you get past its UI foibles. The unmarked text box next to the IM presence settings — that’s not for your IM status message, it’s for a new tweet or Facebook status or identi.ca update or whatever (just not an IM status). It would be nice to be able to set my IM status there, and for my IM status to persist across logout.

I did have my initial experience severely tarnished by bug 501715. Lucid profiles your boot process, looking for loaded files, so that those files can be pre-loaded during the next boot. Result: faster boot times. However, the kernel magic for doing the profiling has a bug. When a boot is profiled, the profile information is written out to disk (in /var/lib/ureadahead/pack), but the kernel neglects to free the internal buffers used by the profiling data. The result is that you use lots of memory (probably an extra quarter-gig on my machine) until your next reboot. So, if you install a package update that requires a re-profile, you have to reboot twice: once to apply the change and profile, and again to free the memory. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

Gripes aside, what do I love? The new theme. Jabber is fairly well-integrated. The little envelope that glows green whenever I have a new Twitter reply or instant message (it’d show e-mail too, if I used Evolution). Having a new TeXLive (Karmic was stuck in the dark ages with TeXLive 2007; Lucid upgrades this to 2009) with the upgraded MetaPost. Battle for Wesnoth 1.8 with a fun-looking new campaign. Workrave doesn’t seem to leak memory like there’s no tomorrow anymore. The boot-up process is good (including a beautiful password prompt when you have full-disk encryption enabled). All-around, it’s tastefully updated.

So grab it, reboot extra times, and have some fun!