Oh... interesting to see some people discusing Linux
technicals here
Well, I have to say I haven't tested Intrepid Ibex yet, and I strongly think I
won't. Freestyle Farfetch'd has it right with regards to the very rushed release cycle, which for the last years has become Ubuntu's major hindrance in the path towards stability and acceptance. I, for one, stick with the "Long Term Support" versions (the most recent being 8.04 "Hardy Heron"), because it's more stable, hence I will use it for servers and virtualized systems offering the exact same management experience than whith normal users.
Anyways, when it comes to ease of use in the Desktop area, Ubuntu has only a few competitors, the most important one I think would be Fedora.
With regards to the filesystem hierarchy, I think it would do as much harm as good to change it now, seeing that among distributions and packagers the acceptance of the LSB standard is still very fuzzy, to say the least. The current hierarchy has the strong advantage that different applications can store versioned content and libs between system installed (/usr) and locally installed (/usr/local) builds and still share a commonly accesible configuration center. That is paramount when switching distributions or performing large-impact upgrades because it allows the user to keep certain functional programs working despite the tremendous modifications to the base system. That mostly comes thanks to having /home. It also eases dependency location (but
not management) because dependencies can be searched between
system,
local and
transient versions without much of a hazzle. But if the packagers don't use this to advantage, then
what's the point...?
Hence I think a move towards Mac style hierarchy would be welcome if it is well studied and if it is actually promoted and adverstised among distributions with a high level of commitment.
Well... I can't talk more about Intrepid Ibex because, as I said, I won't use it. For the ones who like Ubuntu and have the machine and the guts, by all means, go and try, but after some years of Linx experience in several battlefronts, I'd recomend staying with 8.04 or switching to Fedora (house desktop) or OpenSuse (work/school desktop).