rotten bananas

Ok, after a bout with upgrading WordPress and getting my sidebar widgets to work again, I’m back in action. I’ve been using Feisty Fawn for a few hours today. Here’s a basic run down of what I’ve seen so far.

It just works - a list of things that impressed me

• Wireless. The wireless network support is much improved. All available wireless networks are now auto populated. With Edgy Eft my card wasn’t supported in Network Manager. Now it works flawlessly.
• Trackpad Scrolling. This was something that I had never bothered with in Edgy, but it’s supported with no configuration in Feisty.
• Speed. Damn it’s fast. I imagine a large part of it is simply that I’m running a fresh and shiny new copy of the OS, but it seems much faster than Edgy was.
• Search. The standard search actually works. I could never get any results for anything in Edgy, but in Feisty it works splendidly, though I’ll probably still stick with Beagle.

It should just work - a list of things that aren’t yet up to par

• Resolution. I still had to finagle to get my native 1280×800 resolution working. It should be supported out of the box, especially since it’s only a matter of adding it to the xorg.conf file. On the up side, I was able to successfully get it working by doing just that, whereas with Edgy, every time I tried to manually add a resolution to the xorg file, it ended in X11 failures and headaches - never figured out why.
• CPU Scaling. A late Edgy update broke CPU scaling for me a few weeks ago. I had to manually set it up at each boot and enable it. So far it has been working well on Feisty except when my machine returns from hibernation. I only tried it once, but the scaling stopped altogether and my machine was pumping away at 1.6ghz endlessly, which made my lap very warm.

Another step in the right direction

There are still improvements to be made, but Feisty Fawn is a gigantic step forward. I’m rating it as an all-round desktop operating system. I’m not comparing it to Windows. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but for a platform that wasn’t really a viable option in recent history, Ubuntu has brought Linux into the fight for a standard-user operating system. I’m excited to see what the future brings.