I’ve been using linux for about 8 years now, and I remember all my checkpoints installing a new distro.

* It installs and boots
* Xwindows starts
* I can bind a key to launch a terminal
* The mouse will scroll
* Sound will work
* XWindows will work right to take advantage of my hardware

In my installation of Ubuntu, it installed looking great, and checked off almost all of my old ‘getting through an installation’ checklist. I needed to change one setting (through a gui!) to get sound enabled right. I had to do a decent bit of xorg.conf tweaking to get my monitor working right, but that’s understandable — I use a two monitor (one crt, one lcd, run off one video card) setup. It even dealt with my sata drives correctly!

On top of all that, it has a great appearance and software package out of the box, all the plusses of debian package management, and old pieces I could never get to work, like hibernate, are all set in this edition. I’m excited to see a linux distribution put together this well.