Canonical Ubuntu Linux 9.04 review

Version 9.04 isn’t a major leap forward in terms of its user interface. Most of the differences between this and version 8.10 are found in underlying software components. There are improvements, such as support for more wireless networking adaptors, and any new problems we encountered, such as the ATI driver bugs, were rapidly fixed.

Ubuntu 9.04 worked almost perfectly as soon as we installed it. It detected our hardware immediately and we had no trouble getting everything working. We’ve used it to watch films, play online games, encode audio files, run Windows applications, wake us up in the morning and even write this review. With a massive team of volunteers to track, report and correct bugs, errors were resolved in hours rather than days. It costs nothing and, unless you’re a hardcore gamer, it can do all the day-to-day computing tasks that Windows can.