I recently upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft (which is about to be officially released). The upgrade was almost 100% painless, except that I had to reselect the gnome-desktop package after it got deselected somehow. Everything just worked, before and after I rebooted.

There’s a small change in Edgy that means a lot to people like me, who have been building kernels (first Minix, then Linux) for over a decade and a half: all of the specialized X86-related kernels have vanished from Ubuntu, and now there’s just a linux-generic: no more linux-386, linux-686, linux-k7, linux-686smp, etc. Have the Ubuntu people decided to make us all live with substandard performance, just for the sake of simplifying installation for beginners? No. Instead, someone actually went and tested the different kernel variants, and discovered that there was no measurable speed benefit for any of them.

This is a huge disappointment, of course, for people who build and optimize their own kernels (I gave up on that a year or two ago), but it’s also symbol of the change in focus from techie tinkerers to more general users, whose main goal in life is not to be able to boast that they got 0.1% more bogomips out of their system after only three nights of hacking.