Today I installed and tested Ubuntu 10.04 beta to check out what’s new in this super easy to use distribution. Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu are raving about how they are bringing social media to the Ubuntu desktop in this version. However! My tests show they have done absolutely no work in this area and just pre-installed Gwibber, a free and open source social media application that anyone can use. Canonical seems to be making claims about brining social media to Ubuntu but they haven’t done anything special except pre-installing some software they didn’t even write. I’m really big on first impressions and Ubuntu 10.04 really doesn’t look all that much different than any other version of Ubuntu. In fact it appears they messed up the Windows by grouping all the minimize, maximize and close buttons to the left. WTF?

The one other thing I did notice right off the bat was that the GIMP was gone. Why Canonical decided to leave out a very, if not the most important piece of software raises some questions. Canonical needs to spend less time on Google’s Chrome OS and more time on their own OS.

Ubuntu 10.04 = Bleh. Then again I am an Arch Linux fanboy so yeah.