Ubuntu 11

I chose Ubuntu 11 because  10.04 LTS would not ship by default with drivers to handle my SATA controller. I'm installing this to be a development/home machine. I have been running Fedora prior to this but decided that Fedora is not simply free Red Hat version but some bleeding edge stuff that passed all the unit and integration tests. Out of the box stuff "worked", had to get the nvidia driver working, blacklist some nvidia-like driver from loading at boot. What a waste of time.

Some things I wish just installed by themselves. Standard for developers, general public etc. I think Ubuntu has it right. Some items I disagree with:

• inclusion of Mono by default, and all mono based software
• unity is not yet stable, browsing search engine results for solutions or hacks to disable feature X and Y is too similar to Fedora, the unstable "RedHat Linux"

Items that Ubuntu got right:

• flawless installation
• partitioned my drive to share it with the Windows 7 for some unpredicted software / functional need. Ubuntu detected and used the remaining free space to perfectly set up the entire boot loader.
• intelligent installation, based on picked settings, Ubuntu started purging packages that would be otherwise useless to me. i.e. language packs that don't apply to my settings.
• Unity
• for my taste I want to get going with development, quick. Too many visual effects are useless to me unless I have a productivity gain in different contexts. The "one-top-bar", now present in Unity, is absolutely right. No more waste of space. Go Ubuntu!
• search - no one wants to browse through menu sections when you know what you want, search, start typing. It is amazing that Mac's Spotlight search or Quicksilver app had it right long time ago. I'm glad to see it go viral at Ubuntu's product development.
• Media player - Banshee
• well integrated experience
• no annoying audio squeeks and scratches. 
• Using this media player is a pleasure. Just works.
• don't like that Mono is underneath it all but having integrated Amazon MP3 store into the thing it nice. Amazon for some reason chose some latest boost libraries for their plugin and distributions like Fedora don't make obtaining these libraries easy, it is a pain to install (because of the manual steps). This should just work.

I will post more as I discover problems here and there. So far I have changed from default unity desktop to "Ubuntu Classic - No effects" to use the system without being exposed to some session killing bug. Works well.

Highly recommend:
web upd8

Now onto installing Java and getting some work done.