I was really excited when I first heard about Ubuntu Studio 9.04. I do a lot of photo work and wanted to tinker with it a bit. Every time I tried to download OpenOffice though, and I did this on three different machines, it would hang on the emailmerge and would just stay there. Nothing for hours, I left one going an entire day. If you don't need Open Office, or if they fix that particular issue, I would give a big thumbs up without hesitation. If that isn't the case, I would stick with Ubuntu 9.04 and just install some extra packages.

As a newbie i installed 8.10 alongside windows and the upgraded to 9.04, this is everything that i am ever likely to need to browse the web, photo's and some office work, i can't believe how many programs that are available to do anything i desire. It took me a while to learn how to sort the repositories for additional software but i wouldn't swap it for any version of windows. EVER. recommended.