Canonical Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition review

One new feature to Ubuntu One is mobile music streaming to Android and iPhone. All music bought from the Ubuntu One music store (integrated into the Rhythmbox music player), can be streamed directly to your mobile phone. The service costs £3.99 (around £2.50) a month or $40 (around £25) a year.

We’re not convinced by this service, though. If you pay £10 a month you can get a lot more tracks with a Spotify account, while your own music is probably best served by downloading it directly to your handset.

Although the vast number of open source applications have been a strength of Linux, sometimes commercial applications are better at the job. Until now, getting commercial applications installed in Ubuntu have been a little tricky. With the new Ubuntu Software Centre, Canonical wants to change that.

Now, under the Get Software menu, there’s a For Purchase option. This lists commercial applications, all of which will install in the same easy way as all other Ubuntu applications. In other words, the Software Centre is turning into a kind of app store for Linux. As this review went live, there weren’t many paid-for applications available, but we expect this list to start growing. As it stands, the opportunity to get a wider range of applications simply, making Ubuntu a more attractive operating system for standard home users is a brilliant thing.

Ubuntu 10.10 isn’t a massive change from version 10.04, but the features it does introduce make it feel slicker and a more consumer-friendly choice. As it’s free and you can upgrade from the previous version without having to reinstall, there’s very little reason not to. Ubuntu remains our favourite Linux distribution and a great alternative if you don’t want Windows.