I've been playing around with Dapper over the past couple of days. It really isn't so bad. I tried it when it was first released and found it wanting but some of the problems I found seem to have been fixed.

It seems to run faster than Hoary did, which is a definate improvement.

Overall I think Ubuntu is moving in the right direction as a general use desktop OS.

I have to agree.

Ubuntu tends to have a reputation as a "newbies" OS, but that is actually unfounded. While it has good gui config tools, everything is still there under the hood. It can be used by advanced users too, as well as for development, etc.

--Ian

Debian inside, Ubuntu outside. It's probably the best distro I have tried so far. It's great in avery way except networking with Windows PC's, works sometimes, sometimes not.

When comparing Debian to Ubuntu, their really isn't that much of a difference. I think all the Ubuntu hype gave it the rep that it was a newbie distro. Ubuntu is a little bit more automatic than Debian (meaning that more hardware is detected and software that is configured, like my wi-fi card). Remember, gnome is gnome, no matter what distro you use (unless a distribution particular does something completely differnet with it, like Xandros).

All I can say is just have fun with it. After playing around with the i386 version, I just got the amd64 today. It's not super super fast compared to i386 but it does feel just a little bit more snappier.

Debian, Ubuntu, it's all good! What I still don't understand are the RPM based distros. How can those people deal with RPM packages? There is SOOO much dependency problems and unstable repositories that I gave up with any RPM based distro. I've tried a lot of them: Fedora Core, Mandriva, SuSE, CentOS, RedHat... yuck! What won me over was the whole apt-get feature of Ubuntu. It has never been so simple to install software! I recently installed the KDE desktop in Ubuntu and it was a breeze! It automated everything and now I have 2 GUI environments with which I get to choose. Awesome!

I am eagerly awaiting the release of Ubuntu 6.10.

Yes I really like apt-get, which is not only faster than yum, but has a better gui add-on. Plus yum insists on doing a check of the repos every time you have to install software.

There are slight differences between Debian and Ubuntu which become more noticeable as you progress from Warty on to Dapper but they're really semantic things under the hood. Some of the standards in the .debs between the distros for packages are somewhat different. I used to work with the Ubuntu Backports project and we started to run into problems between backporting Dapper beta packages back to Hoary but this is all a fairly moot point.

Fact of the matter is that Ubuntu works quite well as a development environment just because they do a great job of keeping it stable. Can't tell you how many times I've hated certain distros for developement because of their inability to run stabily which I'm sure other developers have run into as well. I just put Dapper on my laptop (Dell e1505) and was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked better out of the box than Windows XP does. I didn't even have to install any drivers except for the proprietary ATI drivers which is expected in any distro.

I've been a software developer since 1964. Longer than many of you have alive. I was a SuSE KDE user until 10.1. Hearing so many good things about Ubuntu I decided to give it and Gnome a two week try. It takes at least that long to give a new GUI a fair test. You must overcome the differences before a fair evaluation can be made. The first difference which was a big improvement over SuSE -- Ubuntu works. Deb repositories really rock. I found Gnome to be more intuitive about tasks a user does a lot. I liked it and Nautilus scripts let me make Ubuntu sing my song. Their are occasionally thing which take a bit to figure out but different doesn't mean can't. I find myself comfortable recommending Ubuntu to Microsoft converts I've urged. Ubuntu is definitely my distro and is likely to stay that way.