Like many other people I downloaded and installed Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) this weekend. I had some stability issues with OpenSuse, so I decided to give Ubuntu another try. Let me say, I really like OpenSuse, but my system was crashing more than it should, especially Firefox. Somehow I screwed my instillation of Opera when I was trying to upgrade, so I was a bit annoyed. Overall I still really, really liked OpenSuse, especially how they implemented compiz. I will likely install the next version when it comes out.
As for Fiesty Fawn. Instillation was easy. It didn't recognize my wireless card, but no version of linux had. I have a dell wireless 1390 based on the broadcom chip. It is annoying, but I used the instructions found here and it worked easily. The only problem I had is that it didn't have the authority to blacklist the braodcom driver. I found the advice that suggests using "sudo -s" and then blacklisting the drivers and it work. There still seem to be a few minor issues with the wireless card signing on to networks that it finds, but so far it has been rather minor.
I set up the system similar to how I had OpenSuse set up. Network manager comes with the package and it is great. I get beryl going quickly by installing from the synaptics pagckage manager, but I think you can also use the add/remove programs. I did not have to touch x.org or anything else. It works well except the screen capture doesn't let me take pictures to show it off. There a picture of my desktop above taken from the traditional gnome screen capture. You can see the cube and how I have my work in different faces. That has really spoiled me.
The sound works great out of the box. The sound worked in OpenSuse, but I had trouble turning it up and down. The sound controls on the exterior of my laptop work great in Ubuntu and I never had to touch it.
I didn't like the backgrounds so I went here where they have a ton of high quality pictures. As you can see I erased the bottom panel and moved the top panel to the bottom. I had to make a few changes so that the panel shows all active windows no matter wich face of the cube is showing, but making that change was easy.
So far I have none of the stability issues that bothered me in Edgy Eft or OpenSuse, but it is still early. The only thing that bothers me is that I don't have the codecs and the plug-ins to play online media working great. They seem to work sometime and not others. I think this is because I installed some of the codecs myself and used automatix to finish it. At some point I am going to uninstall and re-install them.
What Ubuntu has over OpenSuse is the package manager. Apt-get, the synaptics package manager, and the add/remove programs work great. I never had the greatest luck with Yast (OpenSuse) and it frequently asked for the install DVD. I liked the OpenSuse layout better, but I have set up Ubuntu to where I like it.
OpenOffice is working great. If I could get iTunes running reliably, I would never boot to Windows again. So far, I'd highly recommend Feisty Fawn.
