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