I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu, well not so far. But in the spirit of open-mindedness, I'm testing 10.04-Beta1_amd64. And actually I quite like it. The new theme certainly helps, giving the Gnome desktop a very polished and non-intrusive feel.
The trick is now to force myself to use it continuously for a few weeks unlike previous attempts when I have given up after anything between minutes and days. The usual behaviour is to scuttle back to Arch or Gentoo (which I have used daily for 4 and 9 years respectively).
This time feels different - life is busy right now and I need a low maintenance desktop OS; the look and feel is really good (bar the icon-set, that needs some work before they release the final version), so good, it's relaxing to use.
And they've done wonders with the sound - out of the box, this has to be the best-sounding distro I've used so far; I'm using onboard sound, snd_hda_codec_realtek seems to be the major difference I'm seeing to other distros, along with some old Harman Kardon Soundsticks (rev. 1).
Still feeling my way around, will update as I go along.
