Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is here

Christmas comes twice a year for Ubuntu fans. New releases come out on the 4th and 10th months of the year (hence the numbering 10.04 came out in 2010 on the 04th month. There are a number of really good new features which The Silent Number summarises here. Off the top of my head, here's what I'm thankful for this Christmas:

• New design: the aubergine and orange theme is good. I was getting a bit sick of the yellow and brown anyway.
  
• Ubuntu One is now core: 2gb of cloud-based file storage means the same files are available to me on my work laptop and desktop, home desktop and netbook. No more carrying files around on a USB stick.
• Speed: the aim was to get a 10 second boot time. My old P4 doesn't quite get there, but it's nice to have an operating system get faster with each upgrade, not slower and more bloated.
• Social: twitter/identi.ca, IM and chat are all rolled up into the operating system so you can keep track of all your social networking in one place. (I'm loving Gwibber as an identi.ca client too).

If you're not already running Ubuntu, download the LiveCD; it lets you load up and try Ubuntu on your existing PC without making any changes to your system. If you don't like it, pop out the CD and go back to your old system; if you do like it, double click 'Install'.