Last night I decided that I had had enough of not being able to do work for Jokosher on my desktop, and so I took the plunge and upgraded from Ubuntu’s Breezy Badger (current stable release) to Dapper Drake (the next release, due on 1st June, but in beta-testing at the moment.

All my fears about everything breaking were for nothing - the upgrade was as smooth as I’ve come to expect from Debian-based distributions, and nothing was broken. What’s even better is that I got to have a play with Xgl, the next generation X server (graphics for the desktop) which allows for all sorts of fancy 3d effects - 3d scrolling cube virtual desktops, and the funky ‘wobbly windows’.

Even at this stage of development, Dapper feels polished, and the new icon/desktop theme looks great. I haven’t yet tried out any of the new GNOME 2.14 functionality, but it does look like Dapper is going to be a quality desktop distribution.

mrBen