Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, is just a couple of days away, so I’ve been testing it on my laptop to see just how it’s coming along. I rely too much on both my laptop and my desktop to mess with new OSs before they’ve been released (or even just after they’ve been released), but I do keep a little 4GB partition spare on my laptop, so that I can install and test new releases without messing up my primary install.
So far, it’s looking really good. The new visual theme is great to look at, and while it still insists on moving the close/minimise/maximise widgets in window title bars, it at least puts the close button in most accessible place, in the far left. It also has “teh snappy” — Firefox 3.6 on 10.04 snaps tabs around just as quickly as Chrome did on 9.10. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I suspect it’s an Intel video driver update at play.
In terms of music-making, 10.04 gets two big improvements: JACK is now in the “main” repository, which means that a bunch of apps that didn’t ship with JACK support in earlier versions now can (and do), and LV2 support is much more widespread, with major apps like Ardour supporting LV2 out-of-the-box, and more LV2 plug-ins (such as the Invada pack) available as standard packages. The JACK package now automatically sets itself up to get realtime priority access, removing a manual configuration step that’s often a stumbling block for users new to Linux audio.