Throughout the next week (but probably not everday), I’ll be detailing my entire Maverick experience and discussing the insides and outs of the latest version of Ubuntu. Is it a completely new experience or a little polish and elbow grease?

In the Beginning

I was up at midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning, furiously refreshing my browser. I knew very well that it was unlikely to launch immediately, so I went to bed.

While I was sleeping, magic was being worked. From everything I’ve read, Canonical managed to get everything up and running exactly at 10:10 on 10/10/10 (version 10.10, of course ;) ). I don’t care how much I had to wait, that is 100% awesome. Getting up bright and early (and I mean 7 AM), I proceeded to Kaylee- er, my computer and started torrenting the updates. Everything was zipping right along- it took around 10-15 minutes to arrive. I promptly burned to a disc using Brasero, double-checked to make sure my backups were still good, and proceeded with the install.

The installer for Maverick was fantastic in every way I can think of. It was the easiest partitioning/formatting I’ve ever done before, not to mention that it lets you do everything twice as fast because you can fill in all that extra information while it is being installed. That means no more installing, then entering your location, username, password, time zone, etc- you do it at the same time.

No lie, by 8:00 I was up and running. As I had previously noted, I’ve had some hardware issues in the past. My wireless card isn’t detected, and Ubuntu failed to send audio through my HDMI port. Well, at least, it did. I was happy to discover that upon installations all of my hardware issues were fixed. If I had stopped at that point, I would have still been highly impressed with Maverick.

Setting up Shop

At that point I began to set up my computer to fit my tastes. I removed Evolution (I hate that that installed by default), Rhytmbox, and Firefox. I then installed:

  • Banshee (v. 1.8)
  • Gimp
  • Audacity
  • Chromium (Beta Channel)
  • Hotot
  • MakeMKV
  • HandBrake

Then after a short period of setting everything up just the way I like it, I was ready to start tearing this operating system apart.

Noticeably New

While not new for me, there were a few well-thought-out upgrades visually. The first being the window buttons, and the second being the fantastic new Ubuntu Font (both can be seen in the image below). I feel that the font, which has been available for a short while, fits the feel of the operating system perfectly. I LOVE this font.

After reading so much online, I decided I needed to give the sound menu a try. I installed the Banshee extensions and fired it up.

The first thing that I noticed is that the two colors don’t match. That actually bugs me more than I would ever like to admit. As you can see below, the area around the controls (which are very stylish) is grayer than the other areas.

That minor annoyance aside, I love this menu. There are so many times when I want to be able to hide my music player away, but still be able to control and access it easily. This is perfect for that. Not to mention that you can separate all the various audio sources and mute ones that make you angry (like the annoying music on flash games that overpower your music, for example).

 

There are a few more "graphical enhancements," including a new home icon and new Back/Forward/Up Nautilus buttons.

Software Center Revamp

There were many improvements to the software center this time around, perhaps most notably the addition of a payment system for paid apps. For now, the only piece of software for sale is the Fluendo DVD player, but honestly, there are a billion apps that play DVDs for free (the included Totem being one, of course). The main goal this time around was to get a payment system in place and kind of beta test the entire experience.

Visually speaking, there are many improvements. There is a nice, cozy background with clouds. It might not change the world, but it's a nice touch. Additionally, the main page has changed substantially. It lists of the various genres of apps, and gives a slideshow spotlight of some of the best and most popular apps that users might be interested in installing.

It's also very interesting to note that the Software Center now handles installations of .DEB files as well as the manual addition of 3rd party PPAs.