Thoughts On Jaunty Jackalope
tl;dr version: It’s really slick.
Running Ubuntu 9.04 off the LiveCD on my Macbook Pro to see how things work. It’s all going very well, from the important bits like not needing any proprietary drivers to fully utilize all the system hardware to little touches like touchpad scrolling (horizontal and vertical). In my perception, Ubuntu 9.04 is snappier than OS X (admittedly, Tiger) on this machine.
The font rendering in Ubuntu 9.04 is very clean: UI font rendering is crisp, and glyphs are smooth in Firefox. Can’t say anything about the typography engine used by GNOME applications in Jaunty Jackalope; I suspect OS X may still have an advantage there, but I haven’t installed any font files that would allow me to run some ad-hoc tests (like testing automatic ligature glyph substitution) and I’m not sure if the fonts that are bundled with Ubuntu have those features. All that said, I’m not really too concerned about the underlying engine, as 99% of my font usage is a nice monospace font in a programmer’s editor, on the Web, or — if I really need the ultimate in typographic power — through XeTeX.
So I think the only two things I’m really missing are color management (though that’s probably hiding somewhere; I’m sure someone’s worked out a system with e.g. LittleCMS) and an application for me to quickly manage my growing collection of raw-data photos. F-Spot doesn’t quite seem to be able to cut it.
I have been planning to build a capital-F free photo manipulation and management application, though; I’ve never really enjoyed being subjugated by Lightroom. (Besides, Lightroom 2.2 is disgustingly unresponsive on my machine.) Maybe this is it?