It’s interesting to see what’s happening with the latest Ubuntu (9.10, Karmic Koala), which is in Alpha 4 of testing. Firstly, I would like to point out that I think the releases are getting slightly worse as of recent, which may be partly due to the economic crisis and lack of good developers being fully committed.
The features page is getting a little bit embarrassing with things like kernel updates, driver updates, and other under-the-hood changes that have been made. Compare that with a release 2 years ago (Hardy) and you’ll see many more features that impact the user, instead of what we’re getting now which are meta features.
We all love how Linux is flexible, and with Debian we can add and remove packages as our hearts desire. Ubuntu has made Empathy replace Pidgin in the upcoming release. Is this the best way to be spending our time? There are so many things that are more critical than changing the default Instant Messaging client, like: