Is Maverick a perfect 10?

Yesterday was the much-vaunted 10.10.10: October 10, 2010. The folks at Ubuntu went all out and released the next Ubuntu version, 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat," yesterday instead of the usual end of the month.

This may very well be the first time, since adopting Ubuntu as my primary operating system, that I will successfully resist the push to upgrade immediately, for two reasons.

First, I simply don't have the space for it. If I can back up 40 GB of data and clear it off my system, then I can consolidate my files and use an older hard drive as a scratch partition or two, for trying out various distros. Until then, I'm stuck with what I've got.

Second, until I've had a chance to test it out - by which I mean more than test-driving a live CD - I'm not swapping Lucid for Maverick. I'm having issues with Lucid, not the least of which is the quality of full-motion video. My previous distro was Jaunty, which worked just fine. However, in the meantime, something has changed - I assume the default video driver for Radeon video cards is to blame. Until I see evidence that this has improved, or I upgrade to a better PC, I'm not taking a chance on worse performance than I already have.

In the meantime, I'm reading reviews and comments in the blogosphere. Right now, they seem to range anywhere between "best Ubuntu ever" and "worst Ubuntu ever." So time will tell.