Scott gives an overview of some of the changes that we’ll see in Feisty here. One of the biggest changes will be an enhanced desktop with 3D effects and a more polished appearance. Networking is also improved and made easier, and it’ll be much easier to install third party packages without screwing up APT. It will also boot a lot faster by taking full advantage of Upstart.
Yesterday I had a discussion about the contrast between Windows and Linux. The biggest drawback of Linux is that it doesn’t have the same polished appearance as Mac OS X or Windows and there are a lot of rough edges. Also, font rendering is much worse than either Mac OS X or Windows.
Ubuntu needs to hire professional user interface designers and artists to make it look as good as Mac OS X. There also needs to be user interface standards for developers, so applications will appear more consistent. Having two major desktop environments, KDE and Gnome, doesn’t help with consistency.