Distrowatch brings good tidings: Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) has its first development release. I’m burning the ISO now so I can check it out, but it appears to still render a system useless if you try to apt-get update to it.
I really miss being on the bleeding edge, so as soon as I can I will try to switch to Breezy fulltime. It looks like there are lots of great things that might be part of Breezy including a GCC 3.4 to 4.0 migration, tighter Mono integration (and hopefully Beagle!), OpenOffice 2.0 and a plethora of other goodies.
Most users should of course wait until its “done” but I for one can’t wait to take it for a spin.
Update: Breezy installed on a testbed just fine, but most everything I manage to do from saving a file in OpenOffice.Org2 to running a search in Beagle seems to crash. I did take time to fill out the hardware information survey and generally poke around a bit before powering down.
Breezy should be even easier for novice users. Once the graphical installer is in that should reduce the “freak out” factor for new users. There is also a user friendly Add/Remove software menu option under Applications that allows for one click install/uninstall of some core apps. The selection isn’t huge, but it’s there. If you click on Advanced, you are taken to the powerful Synaptic package manager (which rocks).
If you are curious what all is going in to Breezy, check out BreezyGoals, which will soon be migrated from the Ubuntu Down Under section to the main Breezy Badget wiki page.