One thing that did frustrate me (immensely), while trying to install Lucid, was the partitioning situation. I wiped my Ubuntu partition(s) completely, including my /home and everything. I decided before installing that I'd make backups of the important stuff, and go from there. Somewhat frustratingly, the partition manager mid-way through ubiquity decided to give up the ghost and die. Not a problem, I thought, as I downloaded the daily live CD, I'll just install from here....no go - the daily live CD was showing exactly the same issues as the Alpha 2 disc.

Before I ditched my attempts to install Lucid and drop back down to Karmic (9.10), I figured I'd try running GParted, and create the partitions before running ubiquity. Good job I did! This worked fine, without any hitches. Naturally I think I should've been able to specify my partitions as part of the ubiquity installer, but at least it's installed now! More on my Lucid thoughts as I get any experiences to share with it.

I always look forward to the Ubuntu releases, I don't know why, I've started running the pre-release from around alpha 5 or alpha 6 so I know pretty much exactly how it's going to be. Though I do plan on seeding the torrents again for at least 2 weeks So as soon as the .torrent files are there, I'll be grabbing it to seed, though limiting because I don't want to hog all the bandwidth on the VPS!

Other than that plan, I'm hoping to get more involved in Lucid Lynx (10.04) if I can, and if I can find the time. But right now, I'm happy with Karmic, it's shaping up to be an awesome release, and I'll most certainly be mentioning it to those people who say "Linux just isn't ready yet", I think we've come a surprising way in 6 months, and a HUGE step from when Ubuntu first started those short few years ago.

And as I did with Jaunty - I'll be posting my seeding stats after around 2 weeks, just to share, it's always interesting to know how many people use(d) torrents as opposed to straight http/ftp downloads.

So far so good, it's got to be said! There's a few issues I've noticed though, these are:

1. gvfs-trash errored out on first boot, doesn't seem to work
2. gnome-power-manager did the same
3. Shutdown from the shutdown menu doesn't work
4. Keyboard shortcuts don't work

Now I can't really comment on the first 2 because I just sent off the error reports and then I got no more prompts...or running applications Though shutdown is an odd one, I have the button on the far right of my top panel, and under the system menu. Trying to shutdown or restart from either doesn't work at all. I hope this gets fixed soon, until then I may added a launcher to my panel to shutdown instead;)

Keyboard shortcuts is a pain, I have a keyboard shortcut for the terminal, but it doesn't work So I tried changing it to a different key combo - still no dice. It's a shame, it's only now that I've realised how much I used it. I hope this also gets fixed really soon, so I can remove the terminal icon from my top panel.

Other than that I'm really enjoying the Intrepid Experience so far. The "newhuman" theme has grown on me quite a bit. I actually quite like it now, I was unsure at first. Also Compiz works great (cube deformation & 3d windows have been added to my features). On Ubuntu 8.04 running 3d Windows made my laptop grind to a halt...smooth as anything now I'm happy!

I'll post more thoughts after Alpha 5, Beta & RC etc. Until then - have a screenshot or 2

UPDATE: Thanks to this comment I managed to get my terminal shortcut back - so thanks for that I still think that'd be classed as a bug though.