Well at the beginning I pretty much thought the same about arch and the "bleeding edge" part of it.

I've started checking versions of packets just out of curiosity and many of them weren't new, actually parts were outdated.

The reason is imho that the distro don't has that much developers.

Another thing I don't like about arch is that they just dump everything in /opt

And the major problem I had with them, as a kde user, is that they don't have a modular kde in their repos, ok there is kdemod, but it's third party.

oh just though i should point out a bug i forgot for gutsy, openoffice crashes if you have openoffice-gtk installed

Runs just fine on my laptop. I'll not put it on my desktop until the full release. Fingers crossed the GNU/Linux client for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will be out. If the two come out at the same time, Windows will finally be banished from my home

i have to say that i enjoyed suse quiet a lot, the nice integrated kde desktop just worked right out of the box, and everything was just nice. think is, yast wasnt for me, and i managed to kill it to where i couldnt modify my sources, which i had messed up (yast crashed), so i went back to apt-get. i would put it right next to ubuntu in term of new user friendliness. and the installer was amazing (that was a year ago)

i personally think, suse is user friendly, but its just too dog slow, even on high spec machines, and there never seems to be a reason for it it just is.

I haven't tried gutsy yet, but will be doing so in another week or so! I'm getting a system 76 laptop!! Yay!!

As for the ubuntu being for people that just want it to work.. yeah, I kind of get that. I messed around with Linux since I was like 15 or so (23 now), and Ubuntu 6.10 was the first distro vs that more-or-less "just worked". A few issues w/ modems, but thats just par for the course. Otherwise though, everything works - printer, sound, graphics card, everything. Its amazing. And you know, theres a lot of people that don't feel the need to be messing about in their system 24/7, and who want things to 'just work' Thats me at this point, I'm not ashamed to say. I've got lots of stuff to do besides mess about with all the zillion options in slack and debian (slackware was my preferred distro before trying ubuntu)...

Open suse 10.3 din't give me what I wanted. Package management is slow and what's about that slow install. Took me about an hour to install. Looking forward too Fedora 8, but I can't understand why they haven't done anything to the GUI package manager (Cant' remember the name for it)

Liking the new partition editor in the gutsy installer. Everything worked like a charm also. It's getting really polished now. But I really miss a good gui for system services that fedora has. It's open source dammit, why not use the better option for system services..... Maybe it's a matter of pride?

But for now I'm sticking to arch. But for my girlfriend and my father Ubuntu is super. Close to no questions about stuff not working. I can't say I miss back when my father used windows. Calls all the time about what's wrong

I tried the network upgrade to RC1 and found a number of things broke.

So I decided to do a fresh install over the weekend. Got it up and running with about the same amount of messing I did with feisty.

The fresh install did fix one or two issues and also led to me finding fixes for another (Thunderbird dieing due to an older incompatible extension).

In general I quite like Gutsy.

As for downsides:

I use Kubuntu (Prefer KDE) the changing of the default file manager to Dolphin... Dolphin is not ready to be a serious filemanager.. still needs alot of work.

I spent quite a few hour messing with the audio setup to get the right sound card in the right spot. As a part of this I managed to get the volume controls on the USB headset to control the volume of the headset... The upgrade to Gutsy has broken that.. I have reported the bug.

As I have only just finished getting the basics working I have yet to test everything. But it is looking pretty good.

The system I have installed it on is a HP Compaq 6715b Laptop. It is a rather recalcitrant piece of hardware... A number of proprietry hardware options that needed some special treatment.

If anyone is interested you can read about the messing about required in getting Gutsy running on it on this link.

Have Fun,

Rcrook.

I updated to 7.10 Friday. Other than the eye candy stuff not working, and the tweaks to fix them breaking other stuff, everything went really smooth.

Upgraded all 4 computers to Gutsy.
Well, 3 were a fresh install, the other one was an upgrade and it went perfectly!

roflmao

Just upgraded my laptop from Feisty to Gutsy, and while I was at it, I fresh-installed so I could move from 32-bit x86 to AMD64 binaries.

Compiz is neat, and has some features that actually improve productivity (like Scale - a clone of OS X's Expose) and my desktop is significantly snappier and more responsive. My Firefox doesn't crash anymore when I try to navigate elsewhere after viewing a Youtube video (that was a problem with Flash and maybe Feisty's kernel sound drivers) and just about everything works perfectly.

It was one of the most painless installations of Linux I've done. I'm pretty used to Linux, so I'm accustomed to having to spend time hacking xorg.conf to make my video card behave, but Gutsy automagically detected my Nvidia 7700, started with the free nv driver, then let me move to the proprietary 3-D accelerated nvidia driver with a single mouse click.

The main problem I have with Ubuntu is that truly successful upgrades don't seem to be possible and fresh installs are required every six months for an effective system. This mightn't bother some but I find it very tedious and time consuming. Progressive release distros like Gentoo, Arch, Zenwalk etc don't have these issues in my experience and staying up to date requires simple maintenance once or twice a week. Providing you stick with their stable repos you'll have very few problems.

My Ubuntu Gutsy Distro test:
Linux Distro Test: Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10