Bruce Byfield,
You lost me at hello. Specifically when you asked for more balance between advanced features and basic features. I was wondering at that point if you had found Synaptic and the command line apt-get.
Then you kind of went sideways and complained about having 3 options for installing software on Ubuntu. One is very basic (ADD/REMOVE), one is middle of the road (Synaptic) and one is for advanced users (the CLI for apt-get). I see that as being very well balanced. I don't know what you might ask for in that department. What are you stacking Ubuntu up against so I might be able to understand your position.
My wife is a mid level Ubuntu user and she's fine with Ubuntu. My mother, in her 60's, is a very basic computer user and she can find her way around just fine. Now that's a balanced distribution!
I'm an advanced user of Ubuntu and I loved it right up until 7.04 when everything was taken right to the edge... and got pretty buggy as a result.
It also seemed to me that you spent a lot of time reviewing things that aren't even Ubuntu related, but more immediately upstream package development issues. Will KDE 4 be included in 7.10? How can you peg things like that on Ubuntu when it's up stream development that will determine that.
The installation on the default desktop has very few features. A more advanced installer is available with the "alternate" disks, and no, it's not a live CD unless you want it to be. One of the questions surrounding Gutsy was if Ubiquity would separate the OEM option away from the alternate disk.
There are plenty of Ubuntu specific advancements in 7.10 that you didn't cover, didn't research, or seem to skip over with your four page review. For example, does Beryl finally work in Gutsy? I'm sure a lot of people want to know the answer to that one.
Check out Ubuntu's own internal targets for this release and I think you'll see a different story. How many say "implemented" verses "slow development" or worse, "Deferred". See
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/+specs
I'm sure there is a 4 or 5 page story behind that alone and I think it paints a pretty grim picture for this release.
You made no mention of some Ubuntu related packages such as
Ubiquity,
AppArmor and other questions left hanging following Feisty such as,
Have they fixed the network manager?
Have they updated the proprietary drivers? for Nvidia?
How about support for Flash, Java, and other third party plugins?
Where does this new version stand on virtualization?
Can I still play Tux Racer?
There are a lot of things that my wife was looking forward to with this new release of Ubuntu. Most notably she was interested in the bittorrent clients. We had a nightmare of a time finding anything remotely close to stable and one of the posts in a wiki even admitted that there were no torrent clients available for Ubuntu 7.04.
From a more advanced side, I would really like to know what happened to a couple of packages that got deferred in the last release. Did they actually make it into Gutsy? Now that's a good basis for a review of Gutsy. Comparing Ubuntu to Windows is like comparing oranges and grassy hills.
Comparing 7.04 to 7.10... Now that makes sense.