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I always feel like I am getting a fair review from ars.

Quote " I have yet to find any Linux-based BitTorrent client that is as good as uTorrent, a proprietary client for Windows that provides unbeatable download performance and reliability. "

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I am a gnome user but I find Ktorrent stable and more powerful than Utorrent.

i think the greatest flaw of 8.04 as a long-term release is that nautilus broke samba. sure, it has a high priority rating, but come on, what business is going to adopt an os that cant share network resources with windows boxes? that said, 8.04 is awesome for laptops/personal use, and is what im running at the moment.

It's always the flash blob that breaks things. It responsible for 35% of all Firefox crashes. http://wiki.mozilla.org/QA:Talkback:Metrics
PulseAudio does not work with flash since Adobe won't fix their broken implementation.
I expect the PA/gstreamer issues to be resolved via apt updates.

It's basically the last distro I will ever need! Although I did say that when the Fawn landed!

Creative Audigy sound card doesn't work anymore now. Great. :(

Back to Edgy for me.

My initial excitement for this release was soon smothered by the numerous bugs and freezes. A little disappointed, but hopefully things will get be tightened up in the next few months.

Firefox has always been significantly slower (page rendering speed, not network) in linux which always bothers me. Font rendering is also terrible no matter how much tweaking you do. You can either pick blurry or jagged fonts.

I installed Hardy Heron via Wubi and it lasted three days. This was the buggiest, most unstable version of Ubuntu I've ever worked with.

I think I liked 7.10 better honestly. Not enough to switch back, but the little issues in 8.04 do get somewhat frustrating.

This one finally got me off XP on my laptop. I'm 100% linux now.

Of course, i have an Xbox360 for gaming.

HH gives me nothing but problems... on a brand new PC. I'm thinking of downgrading to Dapper, the last distro that worked really well for me.

Not that is that hard to set up a second partition, it is kinda neat that Ubuntu can share a partition with Windows. Makes it viable to those Windows users who are leery of messing with their drives.

Well, I tried to upgrade from gutsy gibbon to horny heron, but all I get after first boot is a white screen of frustration and despair. At least I get to read about it. XD

I would like to know how often users have to use the command line. Is Ubuntu ready for a normal user who don't have enough time to learn/understand all those commands?

i am flat out LOVING pulse audio, it is the next generation

Why wasn't Pulse Audio included in Kubintu? Is there something I'm missing here?

Dugg for Wubi.

Upgraded to it on my file server.

Sincerely wish I didn't....

It's instance to move about my disks did not leave me a happy bunny, will probably switch to Debian in the future instead of upgrading Ubuntu kernals.

A lot of fixes. . but my creative soundcard doesn't work anymore, VMWare stopped compiling and Virtualbox is totally ***** up. thanx guys for the update :/

Is there a fix to get it to work with new airport cards in MacBook Pro?

Normally I hate Ubuntu reviews... but Ars has done a great job with this one. Clearly Ubuntu has chosen to make the desktop as simple as possible. Look at the comments on every "improvement" in 8.04... the program is nice, but configuration options are non-existent. Is this really what we want linux to be? Accept the distro's defaults or find another one? What happened to tweaking your own system...

If you have a working Gutsy setup, there really isn't a compelling reason to upgrade to Hardy (yet).

As good as Hardy is, which is miles better than Gutsy, it's still got some bad issues. Laptop lockups still exist, and occasionally will make my laptop flash it's caps lock and num lock LED's. I figure this is because the kernel or something is trying to access memory or CPU registers illegally. Windows doesn't lock up my system.

If you want to try it out and your networking does not work, this might help you (wish they could fix it)

Manually set the DNS entries -- my network was being assigned an IP by my router just fine, but nothing I could do would access the connection untill I specified the DNS. Immediately the network started working.

I was happy with everything about my upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 until I opened Firefox and discovered that most of my favorite FF add-ons don't work with FF3b5!

How is this considered an LTS release if it includes a BETA version of one of its most important bundled apps???

I love 8.04. The only complaint I have (and it's not a big one) is that I'm not a big fan of Transmission, and think they could've really done a little better. They could've left FF2 on there as well, a little too many bugs and crashes with the FF3 beta.

I haven't had any problems with Gutsy, been using it since the beta.

I installed Hardy on my wife's laptop. It didn't recognize the wireless card out of the box so I had to do some tricks to get it working. From time to time something happens with the internet connection that I have to reenter the WAP key. Quite annoying, now I have to keep a post-it note with the key.

On the plus side, Vista kept screwing up with the built-in webcam every other week, and I had to uninstall and disable it, then reinstall and re-enable. Hardy so far has the webcam working perfectly right after installation.

So in the end, she prefers Ubuntu. I only go to Vista to use Visual Studio and watch movies on an external display. I know I can do external displays on ubuntu but the only time I tried it was a pain and something so simple should just work.

One of the most annoying failures of this release (for me anyway) is a completely broken/unusable xen kernel.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/218126

I installed this thing and I had trouble when I needed a custom 1366x768 resolution. :-(

Can someone tell me if it has static ip addresses for wifi yet? I tried the last one and I got my driver working for the wifi but it refused to work on my secure network, but it worked on my neighbors DHCP router.

I agree with this article 100%. Gutsy was too unstable on my machine, so I decided to upgrade. Now everything works lots better, its faster, more stable. But pulseaudio is terrible, there is no benefit to me to having it, and it breaks sound in Wine and Snes9x. There is no fix for the sound on an AMD64 yet.

I think 8.04 should have not left beta to buggy, went back to 7.10

I had to go on google to get my video working, but other than that it detected all the hardware on my Toshiba laptop (which until recently had been notoriously problematic for Ubuntu). Finally I'm on my way to running Linux by itself and not needing to rely on clutchy proprietary software, licenses, the whole nine yards.

I'm not an expert, but I think this system is well on its way. Is it just me or did that review nitpick a lot of details that would go completely over the head of the average user? Understandably it's a tech site, and Ubuntu is also used for servers that need a solid OS, but I wonder if they're seeing the forest for the trees. For the average user who wants reliability, media capability, browsing and an office suite this distro works great. I'm definitely a geek, but I was able to take on challenges with Linux that I previously thought were way above me. I don't see how Ubuntu couldn't help pave the way for more amateur users to learn about Linux without feeling intimidated, especially with such an active community to help.

So from what I am reading Hardy is the Vista of Ubuntu and Gutsy was the XP? I've installed Hardy 64bit and after reinstalling it several times due to me screwing it up I can say I am actually liking it a lot. On Gutsy I kept having flash problems with the video freezing and then fast forwarding and all sorts of trickery. My only problem is I can't seem to enable 5.1 sound only 4.1 other than that I am loving it.

I'm a heron addict.

I LOVE Ubuntu, but I still agree with this whole-heartedly:

"The previous release was the "gutsy" one with experimental new technologies and this was supposed to be the "hardy" one with an emphasis on stability. I'm quite happy to suffer with the bugs for six months, but I can't imagine anybody using it on the desktop for three years in its current state. This release is disappointing because it falls short of what was promised, but it still delivers a lot of value for experienced users who will be able to work around the weaknesses.

Ubuntu has achieved Linux desktop dominance by offering a significantly better experience and more usability than competing distributions, but with the others are starting to catch up in those areas, this is a bad time for Ubuntu to be stumbling. Fedora 9 and openSUSE 11 are both right around the corner and they might finally give Ubuntu a real challenge on the desktop. "

Great article.

Good review, but its hard for any review of the OS to stay 100% relevent- most of the bugs and issues described have been worked out or improved from updates in the last few weeks. The package manager automatically installs necessary fixes and increases usability. I am very happy with HH and I think its a huge jump from GG. Great place to start if you are new to Linux or just tired of putting up with M$ BS. Tux Lives!

Does anyone know if this is easier to install on an external HDD than previous versions of Ubuntu? I'm going to try myself, but it would be nice to hear other people's experiences.