Yesterday, after reading about the release of Hardy Heron beta release ( announcement), I decided to try out the iso torrent download to see how fast it would be, as compared to a normal http download. I have to say I was extremely happy after seeing it pushing my network connection to its limits. Download your Hardy beta here

This was the making of a great Saturday, because I decided to burn the newly downloaded iso, and took the Hardy Heron for a spin on my test computer.

The install was a mixed feelings operation, since I didn’t like the new pan feature of the world map, when selecting the timezone. Also the timestep effect when selecting the keyboard is a non-feature, just confusing. But besides that, it’s as clean and as fast as I ever saw the ubuntu install (ubiquity).

After the install, I was blown away. The new theme is very slick, and easy on the eye. The Heron desktop background is both pleasing and modern, making me a happy guy. Everything about the system feels good. I installed this on a fairly old machine, an athlon XP, with 512 ram, and a very inexpensive Radeon 9250. And boy is it fast, even with compiz (which is enabled by default). It feels faster than Gutsy, and everything seems to just work.

It leverages Gnome 2.22, which was released not so long ago, and seems quite nice. It has some nice features, as you can see in the release notes. I haven’t tried the world clock yet, but i definetely will, along with all the other new gnome features. I also found Firefox 3 beta 4 to be a very nice experience, even though I am an Epiphany user myself.

It looked so fast and rock solid, that I felt the immediate urge to install it on my production machine, where I live 90% of the time (my Thinkpad T60). It’s installing as we speak, since I had to do some backups first.

I would recommend that everyone update to the Hardy Heron as soon as they can. It already feels rock solid, it is blazing fast, and if you catch a bug, you can help out by reporting it on launchpad.