Ubuntu Edgy Eft was released on Thursday, and today I thought I would check it out. To sum it up: I'm impressed.

The hardware detection was immaculate. The only thing that I had an issue was the bcm43xx driver for my wireless card. This was using the reverse-engineered driver and the only reason that it didn't work was because it didn't have the firmware (which they're not allowed to redistribute)- so I just copied the firmware from /lib/firmware on the hard drive to the ramdisk, restarted the module and bingo- it worked! I haven't been able to get this working on my Debian installation yet, but I'd prefer to use ndiswrapper than not having wireless- so to be honest, I haven't tried that much! My preferred resolution (1600x1200) was activated immediately and I was even able to download and install apps from universe and they ran perfectly too! The thing that is hard to compete with is the simplicity- everything was just so easy for everyone!

I am very impressed and the Ubuntu team have done a great job! This really will be the start-point for more people using Linux. Although I'm not going to jump to start using Ubuntu now, I will certainly consider dual-booting it with Debian next time I re-install Debian.