Beta! Beta!

Last Thursday, the release team announced the Jaunty Beta. I'm actually quite satisfied with the overall quality of the Jaunty Ubuntu Desktop. I have the desktop installed as my production work station now, and also I am running UNR on my eee.

A couple of thoughts:

1. UNR is the sleeper hit of Jaunty. UNR is offers all the benefits of a full Ubuntu desktop, along with Neil Patel's great launcher experience. For my part, I use my eee in normal deskotp mode, but I now that a lot of people use the launcher. The thing is, the mobile team and the kernel team combined forces to ensure that UNR works on a series of netbooks (including my eee). And also their is a very easy USB stick installation path. So here is a flexible, dependable, functional, full productivity desktop that also works great for typical netbook tasks, available for free and also free to modify, redistribute, etc...
2. notify-osd and indicator-applet came together nicely for Jaunty. There's some more polish and refinement to be gained in Karmic, but by releasing in Jaunty, the Ubuntu community will be able to see some real usage of the features, and tune based on that real usage, as apposed to the opinion flame wars driving discussion today. Also, the Canonical Design and Ux team continues with a series of great hires (hi ivanka).
   
3. xserver.org is more or less coming together, however, there are a couple of hot spots, especially related to Intel hardware. We're currently thinkng about how to organize in Karmic so that the Ubuntu community can exceed users' expectations related to X. In the meantime, Canonical made a great new hire for X related issues on the OEM team. So in addition to the stellar contributions of Bryce in organizing X, we'll have tselliot contributing in device specific ways as well.