The installation went very easily as to be expected from Ubuntu. There’s not many options to choose but even so it’s a very polished and smooth procedure.

My first impression of the desktop is that, like the installer, it’s very polished in appearance. I really like the new notification icons, they are very clear and more professional than before. My main comments are that it seems very responsive, there’s no delay when clicking on menus and applications open almost immediately.

I would say that Firefox opened from a cold start in about 2 seconds and even Open Office opened much quicker than I expect.

I tried to use bootchart to get a feel for how long the boot process took, but unfortunately even after multiple reboot it continued to report boot time of over 1 minute which I know must be wrong. My gut feeling is that the boot was around 25 to 30 seconds.

Having used Fedora for a few years now I don’t think I’m lightly to switch and I miss many things out of the box (there’s no GUI to control the firewall or services for example) that I’m used to in Fedora. Plus I like the ability to choose the install packages on the Fedora DVD instead of adding them later from the repositories.

Having said that, I think Ubuntu looks and performs great and the other distros can certainty learn a lot from Ubuntu 9.10.