Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Breezy Badger) At A Glance

Breezy has been officially released!!!.
Now, I believe it's the perfect time for me to get a good grasp with the newest version of my favorite GNU/Linux distribution.
This is the specification of my system:

• AMD Sempron 2200
• Asrock Motherboard K7S41
• DDRAM 512 MB
• 2x40GB Maxtor Hard Disk
• Pioneer DVD-ROM
• on board sound & vga
  

I. Installation
The text-based installation is similar with Hoary's. It's not eye-candy like Xandros' or Linspire's installer, but it definitely gives you more control.
There is a new feature in Breezy installer : installing into free space reclaimed by shrinking existing partition. It's a nice feature for those new to linux and want too keep his OS by dual-boot. However, I choose to customise the partitioning. My 1st HD contains my main system: Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary) and I do not want to mess with it, so I divide my 2nd HD into root and home, then install Breezy into them.

II. First Boot
The first installation phase is smooth, and after grub installed into my 2nd HD, it reboots. This first boot, however, is not smooth. I have to manually edit the Grub configuration file myself, before the installation goes into the second phase. After additional packages were installed and configured, The new splash screen shows up, and bring me into the familiar ubuntu login screen.

III. Logging in
Finally, I got the taste of Gnome 2.12. I notice some improvements in nautilus, evolution and app-install. However, what I really like is these new features: smeg (menu editor), boot-admin & disks-admin. I know I can edit menu manually, tinkering with menu.lst, or mount those hard disks manually, but having these tools will make my Gnome more humanly, just like Ubuntu slogan: Linux for Human Being.

III. Applications
I don't see any big difference with hoary, since I am not a software developer (those new gcc compiler will remain under the hood forever). One thing I'd like to try is JFFNMS 0.8.2. I use ubuntu at work as nms, so it's my chance to try it out. I'll write about this later.
I would also try Ubuntu as headless server. I feel my desktop performance much below hoary. I think it's because of GNOME 2.12 (My XFCE & E16 run well). It takes some moment for most apps to appears. Perhaps I should test Kubuntu to confirm this.

IV. Conclusion
Wow, it's too early to conclude anything since I've just tried it for two days!
Anyway, I like breezy, but the low performance of this release bothers me much. I even scrap my standard breezy installation on my old laptop to replace it with XFCE-Ubuntu(!). I think I'll keep monitoring the ubuntuforum to seek resolutions of these issues.