Hardy Heron: first look
Started the upgrade process to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) last night, and finished it up this morning. Overall impressions are very positive, thanks to a few (but not all) of the things that broke in Gutsy fixed. The updates to Gnome and Firefox mean I can probably upgrade to Hardy from the rock solid Feisty Fawn I’ve been running at work.
The bad:
- My network drives on the desktop (and in Places) disappeared
- I don’t care for the default Heron background, switched back to the one from Gutsy
- Immediately got a crash report on reboot about Gimp and Firefox, not sure what that was about
- Suspend works (which I’ve gotten out of the habit of using) but Resume still doesn’t—C’MON, this is important!
- Still seeing green cursor ghosting in Gimp (this only seems to occur on my ThinkPad X23)
The good:
- Love the new World Clock applet
- No more justified text selection wiggle with Gnome 2.22.1 + Firefox 3 Beta 5 woo!
- No more agonizingly slow keyboard repeat rate when entering comments with Live Comment Preview plugin
- The Disk Usage Analyzer is sweet
The in between:
- The native Gnome widgets in Firefox are cool, but the corners of Gnome’s slightly round buttons look funky on non-gray backgrounds
- The thumbnail for a transparent png on the desktop now has a border, guess it’s time to retire my collectible thumbnail icon
- Text in Terminal looks a little fuzzy
Other observations:
- When creating links in my WordPress post in Firefox 3, the pre-populated “http://” does not always get pre-selected, leading to potential “http://http://example.com/” errors from pasting in URLs
- Firefox 3 appears to be using new delimiter rules for breaking long lines of text (like URLs) across lines in textareas, as in they break now, where before they did not
- For my minimalist firefox ui which used to just have the back button on the menubar, I had to drag the new combined navigation button set from the navigation toolbar to the menubar
- Firefox 3 is SO MUCH SNAPPIER
Still to test:
- USB 2.0 support on my ThinkPad T42
- Bluetooth support on Stephanie’s computer
comments: be first!