Shuttleworth wasn’t kidding when he said user were in for a surprise with the latest flavor of Linux, Jaunty Jackalope.  While the title follows the traditional goofy naming convention of past Ubuntu distributions, this time Ubuntu is packing some serious heat.

My personal favorite, and perhaps where the distribution got its name in the first place, is the much faster boot speed.  While 8.04 and 8.10 has been mostly standard in terms of boot time in the past, 9.04 has dropped the boot time down to about 75% of what it was.  Some users are reporting boot times of as low as 17 seconds using solid state drives.  While its no instant-on OS, it sure is the fastest booting OS I have used so far, and makes dual booting that much less painless for those of us required to hang on to Windows.

The ext4 file system is a second thing you might want to check out.  While ext3 is still the default file system during installation, I selected ext4 and have had no issues so far.  There are many small improvements , made here, but you are mainly going to notice a performance boost in dealing with large files — nice for performing backups or dealing with media.  Oh, and the maximum file size has been increased to 1 exabyte.  (Thats big!)

Jaunty is also looking better than ever with three new themes.  Finally some native support for those of us who enjoy the darker look.  You can check them out here.

The fourth feature on my list is Gnome 2.26.  You might not notice too much here immediately, but there are a few cool things that catch your eye here and there.  Being a GUI fanatic, I always appreciate update in the DE department.  The Gnome updates basically included UPnP improvements in Totem, a few adjustments to Empathy, and improvements to Brasero.  I had not been a fan of any of these apps besides Totem prior to Gnome 2.26, so this wasn’t ultra exciting news.

The out of the box device recognition and stability are fantastic as usual.

Jaunty Jackalope is a much bigger step up than Intrepid was anticipated to be.  The faster boot times and slick new looks will make even that older PC in the corner feel young again.  Once again, if you haven’t taken the plunge into the world of Linux, now wouldn’t be a bad time to think about doing it, as you won’t be disappointed with Jaunty no matter which OS you are coming from.