My Gibbons Runneth Over

Now there’s a topic that won’t make much sense unless you’re in the Linux community.
This week saw the release of Ubuntu 7.10, aka ‘Gutsy Gibbon’. I’ve been firmly in the “Stick with the stable releases” Linux camp for quite a while, even when Debian was pushing 2 years behind on their ‘stable’ release.
I’ve been running Ubuntu 7.04 (aka ‘Feisty Fawn’) on yawl for the last year or so, and have had nothing but good things to say about it. It’s been stable, useable, and lets me do my work. Excellent.
Yesterday I ran the update process and told the system to update itself to 7.10. The total processing time would be about 2.5 hours, due to a gig and change of data that needed to be downloaded (okay, I have a lot of packages), so I decided to go to lunch.
Upon returning, I answered 2 questions about local files I had modified, let the installation finish, and, with a small dose of trepidation, rebooted.
It came back fine.
In fact, everything came back fine. I have seen not the tiniest indication of a problem. Ubuntu just upgraded something like 1100 packages on this machine to newer versions, and everything Just Plain Works. All my basic tools are fine, if upgraded and showing some new bells and whistles. The traditional boondoggles of Linux system maintenance never even flinched. Sound, network, accelerated graphics (I have an nVidia card) – all came back up flawlessly, even with my desktop back as it looked before.
There are some noteable changes in the new release. The file manager has been replaced with ‘Dolphin’, which I have to say the jury is still out on. Initially I was very nervous about replacing my beloved Konqueror file system browser with something new, but my initial impressions of Dolphin are good. Everything seems there, if a little heavy on the big icons. I’ll play with it a while and see if it will cut the mustard.
This is how computers are supposed to work. No license hassles, no nightmare changes from one revision to another, no “Burn it to bedrock and reinstall from scratch” problems with upgrades, or problems with “This app worked with my old OS, but doesn’t work with the new one!” – one big distribution contributed to by everyone, with everything updated at once and confirmed to work together.
Yay Ubuntu!