ok, first off i was expecting maybe a few under the hood changes and not much more, but was i ever wrong.

upon booting to desktop for first time, my native resolution was being used. (1440 x 900, which never happened before without tweaking) next, i was told there was a video driver available. click, done. it also gave the option to install video drivers for the new nvidia cards. sweet. i went to places>computer and lo and behold, all my drives (4) were mounted and had read/write capability out of the box. very nice.(no more ntfs-config BS) next, i went to software sources. all repos were checked off. went to add/remove apps chose all available apps from the pull down menu, and searched ubuntu restricted extras. 1 click and had all codecs, flash, and java. (stands up and applauds again) add/remove apps seemed to have alot more packages available too.

the screen and graphics preferences was a nice touch. after video driver install, the default desktop effects are nice without being overkill. you also have the choice of no effects or enhanced.

the windows have a more 3D look to them with the shadowing effect. (a kind of aero-ish look) the shuffle effect when switching windows was kind of cool also.

i am sure that there are other goodies i havnt discovered , or havnt been implimented yet. and can't wait to see.

i have a 100% running ubuntu install without having to go to the command line once. this should make newbs even happier and draw greater interest from non-linux/ubuntu users. highly recommended.

great job development team! keep up the good work.

please note that this a developmental release. there may be bugs/issues that still need to be fixed. release date is set for october 18th.