I’m downloading it using BitTorrent right now. The update was put up sometime today. I went out for a long bike ride and it was waiting when I got back. If you want your copy, go here. This is the final beta release before it goes gold sometime next month. From what I’ve read, I anticipate there won’t be massive updates after you install this one. They are treating it like an RC (release candidate).
In times past I was all puppy dog on this stuff, wagging my tail with anticipation as I downloaded the latest gee-whiz ISO of this or that. And then most of the time it would be some huge disappointment. Once or twice something I installed on whatever system I had at the time was actually worth keeping. Some examples would be old Red Hat 6.3 and 7.3, SuSE 8.2, RHEL 6, and Debian Etch. Those were the highlights in some twenty years of messing with Linux.
After some rough patches in those days, I might spend some time running Windows instead. I still think Win2K was some of the best technology for its time. Did you know there is a handful of serious developers trying to keep it alive? They are gathering snippets of code to fix genuine security risks and major bug fixes and trying to keep it viable. You can still get a version of Opera to work on it, and at least one AV vendor keeps updating the definitions for a version that works on it. I expect the unofficial updates for XP to have an even bigger effort keeping it alive.
So unless Canonical does something totally stupid, this may well be one of the best releases in a long time. Since they dropped official support for Kubuntu some time ago, I think it has really made life better. That is, I don’t have to fight with the stuff they ram down the throat of Ubuntu users. The folks who repackage it with the K Desktop are free to leave out the junk. I’m not wagging my tail, but I have some tentative hopes this will be one of the good ones, coming at just the right time to help me migrate a bunch of XP refugees over to something genuinely better.
If you have any doubts about keeping Windows on your system, this is a really good time to consider Kubuntu.
