There have been jokes made before about creating custom branded Linux distributions including religious distributions but Ubuntu Christian Edition is for real. Essentially it is an independent version of Ubuntu packed a few extras including Biblical software and Web filtering software. Some of the artwork has been re-branded to include the Jesus Fish. Ubuntu uses Gnome by default and so does Ubuntu Christian Edition. Does that mean KDE is for heathens? (Only joking, we are on different teams but we are all playing the same game. Look forward to see you all at Akademy.)

According to Distrowatch.com yes it does include Evolution for email. Gimp is also included. I mention the latter because both are programs have names which I think any distributions might want to change and would be well within their rights to do so under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL makes such forking and rebranding possible, if anything I believe developers should do more to allow re-branding without forking, agree to disagree and convince those people to help out to avoid the redundant work a full fork would require. Very often it projects themselves need to rebrand for legal reasons and it seems the kind of thing every project should plan for a lot like portability. Being able to easily rebrand your software may open up commercial opportunities and provide a clear distinction between commercially supported and free versions of the same software.

Ubuntu Christian Edition upset one commentator so much he felt the need to describe it as the "Most offensive thing I've seen all day". Sure makes a change from the self-righteous indignation of those who claim to be religious.

Breezy Badger has been released and I have been playing around with the last release candidate for the past few days. It has been a while since I last tried Ubuntu, unless I also include my efforts with Kubuntu a few months ago. At the time I decided not to criticise in case the version I tried out was unrepresentative. Unfortunately I see the things which bothered me most about Kubuntu Live CD are also problems with the current version of the Ubuntu Live CD.
Knoppix is the grand-daddy of all Live CD distributions and it got a great many things right. Knoppix consistently does things better than just about every other Live distribution out there. You would think people would be smart enough to just copy Knoppix but amazingly many other Live CD distributions fail to recognise its brilliance and mess things up. Live CD distributions by nature tend to be slow so the last thing I as a user want is anything which makes it any slower. Ubuntu makes the unforgivable mistake of asking way too many questions every time. This is simply wrong. This makes things unnecessarily slow. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm not asking for a Graphical installer like Redhat Anaconda or Progeny - at least not for the Live CD - I dont want to be asked any questions at all by default.

Part of the problem is the Ubuntu Live CD is a means to an end, seemingly designed as an after-thought to show off Ubuntu rather than to work really well as a Live CD. What might seem like minor annoyances to the developers make it unacceptable to use it directly off the CD for regular long term use (at least not without having somewhere to store your settings and skip the questions you shouldn't be asked in the first place). The Ubuntu developers need to sit down and reconsider their strategy, or at least their marketing because although their Live CD is representative of their distribution if you judge it as a Live CD it is a lame duck. Confusingly the installation CD is entirely separate from the demonstration Live CD which seems like a lot of redundancy. It would make a whole lot more sense if you could try it then install it (which is something Morphix Live CDs used to do last time I checked).
Aside from thier muddled strategy there are not many problems you can blame on Ubuntu. I only found one clear mistake in the release candidate and it is a minor detail I'm sure was quickly fixed. About Ubuntu did not work, it tried but failed to bring up a help page. The default page in the web browser (Firefox) does however provide information About Ubuntu and is presumably similar to whatever was missing. Ubuntu has added two menu items of their own to the Help menu of almost every application, one for "Get Help Online" and another for "Translate this Application". Ugly as it may be, it does seem like a reasonable and relatively unintrusive way to customize the Ubuntu version of Gnome. Inlcuding an application named Smeg is entirely inapprorpriate asking for trouble and is even worse than leaving the GIMP showing and I hope it was oversight rather than ignorance which allowed this to happen but either way it is unprofessional and the blame lies squarely on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 5.10 includes a preview version of OpenOffice 2 now looks a lot more like Microsoft Office. Some might say aping the competition only makes the differences harder to get over but I've never bought into that arguement. I firmly believe it was imperative - a commercial necessity even - to give users what they wanted and make things more like Microsoft Office. There are some downsides though, the old interface did strongly encourage the use of styles which are well worth learning for any frequent user and can help produce higher quality and more managable output. Not to worry: Embrace now, extend later.
OpenOffice was big and clunky and frankly it still is but it seems to load a little faster and once it was loaded it was nice and responsive so it certainly feels faster. Totally biased as I clearly am (by my long term interest in all things Abiword) but OpenOffice is hardly the best choice if you are serious about making a Live CD for day to day use. I wish distributors could find a place for a fast light Word Processor like Abiword and I sincerely believe there should be room in there between the text editors and the full Office Suite. Once more and yet again it proves the power of software bundling and for one reason or another OpenOffice is a must have.
Looking at OpenOffice 2 all nicely themed and integrated with Gnome I realised it may now be good enough and the minor differences between it and proper Gnome applications will be too small for ordinary users to care or maybe not even notice. I think I can safely predict a surge in the popularity of OpenOffice when 2.0 is officially released and starts getting wider attention, especially if they can get users who were turned off by version 1 to reconsider.

The rest of my observations have more to do with Gnome than Ubuntu. Gnome 2.12 is a good incremental improvement but there are still a great many things I wish I could do more about (and if I can get an adequate job hopefully I will still have the time and energy to try again). There are still many bothersome inconsistencies in the desktop which could be solved by better policy and improvements to the toolkit. For example toolbar docking is certainly not essential and if anything it has has helped constrain most developers to only or two toolbars in their applications but it has resulted in some inconsistencies. Project Ridley and GTK3 will with any luck, help create opportunities for developers to make Gnome more consistent.
Another problem is bad old habits from Gnome 1.4 still lingering like a bad smell. The first time you run it Gnome Meeting asks far too many questions, ten pages of them and the questions are poorly presented. The wording could be improved but I'm hoping the efforts to unify the identities needed for Mail and Chat will eventually get around to Gnome Meeting and with a few good defaults make these kinds of questions entirely unnecessary. (Ubuntu already neutered the GIMP and stopped it from asking spurious questions.)
There are old issues and minor annoyances still bothering me in applications like gThumb, File-Roller, E.O.G., Gedit, but progress is being made. Ubuntu includes a Bit Torrent client but I am convinced Gnome should include a Bittorrent client.
Totem annoys me immensely, mostly because the developer Bastien Nocera decided he knew best and ignored the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (H.I.G.) and refused to even support the specified behaviour if someone else implemented it. Normal users are more likely to be annoyed by the version of Totem included by Ubuntu (and any other distribution serious about Free Software) because by default it plays hardly any commonly available formats for various legal reasons. Irregardless of the reasons it sucks rocks through a hose. It may not be their fault but it certainly is their problem. Multimedia it is still a very significant problem which badly needs to be attacked on many fronts.

Linux.com reviews Ubuntu 5.10

Proposed Ubuntu Splash screen. Damned funny.
(Not so much if I have to explain the joke).

While looking for a link to explain the joke above I found some parodies of those motivational style posters, describing the various distributions:

Ubuntu

#

Red Hat

#

Fedora

#

Debian

#

Slackware

#

Caldera

#

Mandrake

# (Mandrake now known as Mandriva).

Gentoo

#.
See also Gentoo users are Ricers which compares Gentoo users to modified car enthusiasts.
(the # symbol links to where I found the images, it would be inconsiderate to waste their bandwidth by direct linking them)

Matthew Thomas (mpt) well known for his Mozilla related work has described at length his experience of enduring Ubuntu (Coral Cache link to Enduring Ubuntu). His recent conversion to Gnome explains his sudden appearance on the Gnome usability list and in bugzilla. He damns Ubuntu with faint praise calling it "the first Linux-based system tolerable enough for me to use for everyday work." He does write a thorough review though and I'll attempt to address answer some of the questions he poses most of which are Gnome issues and not specific to Ubuntu. His style of writing is very authoritative and it is tempting to believe him but I would urge caution and encourage people to question his assertions just as carefully as those of any other new user. Perhaps he is aware of the potential solutions or how difficult some of these problem are to fix but he has not made that clear and it is definitely worthwhile to provide more information.

Read his review first or else these responses won't make much sense (if I have time I'll rewrite this later with appropriate quotes). Comment 26 is my favourite by far and 13 is another important point.

1. Clearly he likes his Apple Mac and would like a permanent menu bar. This is nothing new, there are many other Gnome users who would like this too but it is not possible at present and no one seems to be working it. (See the mailing list archives for the desktop-devel-list.)

3. Icons on buttons and menu items can be hidden using a combination of themes and gnome-ui-properties. Developers would be insane to try and change this one application at a time. (Use stock items!). The merits of his point (of which I am not entirely convoked) is not important, but what is important is that developers address it the right way keep Gnome consistent.

5. Some applications highlight lists by alternating the line colour, which is a nice idea but certainly inconsistent. I've thought about this before and what I would really like is grid (think spreadsheets) preferably with a variation in the weight and colour of the line every ten iterations. This would make it easy to estimate roughly how many items are in the list at a glance.

7. A highlight to indicate that an object is in focus is useful but it shouldn't but this should be subtle. In fact done correctly this would mitigate the problem mentioned in point 9. I wonder what it might be like if Panel items were more like Toolbar items and had an option to show a text label along side them (making them easier to learn and a bigger target, easier to hit).

10. Thank you Ubuntu for using standard Gnome foot icon and not giving in to the temptation to rebrand everything without a good reason.

11. Capitalisation in the Applications menu should be consistent and I am sure patches or bug reports would be greatly appreciated.
Technically "Four-in-a-row" doesn't count as incorrect capitalisation as that is the application title not merely a description.

12. I do not see how it makes sense exclude applications from the menu but better integration and showing them in the File Manager in the appropriate context does make sense. I am confident it is something the Nautilus developers have given thought to but a well targeted bug report wouldn't go amiss.

13. I think the Gnome usability experts are almost ready to give up on the mnemonics on the OK and Cancel buttons. Getting developers to consistently have Escape dismiss dialogs could be difficult.

14. The Close button is clearly labelled and more obvious and easier to hit than the icon in the title bar. I think more users would be confused if they were not provided and I would hate to see them go.

16. Any application that requires using the right mouse button is broken and inaccessible and must be fixed. Apple are wise to ship a one button mouse by default and force this discipline on developers but Gnome doesn't have the same power to compel developers.

17. Non modal dialogs should not be made forced to be modal unless they cannot be made more robust so that they can finish the task they start.

18. Abiword gets a phenomenal amount questions from users who have hit the Insert key and are wondering what has gone wrong.
I was quickly assured that there are people who actually use Insert mode when I suggested disabling it but there should be done to protect the novice user.
The Caps Lock is annoying but relatively harmless but disabling it might take more explaining than it is worth even if it would PROTECT THE INTERNET FROM USERS WHO SHOUT. Conversely it would be nice if the Page Up and Page Down keys actually scrolled up and down the page in more applications.

19. Using the Ubuntu Live CD I had not a clue what the Administrator password might be. Extremely annoying.

21. Most operating systems are as stupid as a bag rocks when it comes to users with no network connection. Desk-bound developers forget that not everyone has a permanent net(work) connection. There is massive room for improvement here.

23. and 24. Remembering what it was like back when you were first starting to use computers is extremely difficult and it is hard not to desensitised to jargon. (username, start-up, shutdown, reboot, root, GOTO, TODO, dialog.)

25. and 34. More jargon. Not an oxymoron though.

26. This has to be my favourite point of all. GNOME developers do not have a SHOUTING problem, their only problem is that developer humour is not funny.
I have said it before and I fear I will be forced to say it many more times that the notion of G.N.O.M.E. as an acronym must die. The meaning is unhelpful and was clearly retrofitted to the word Gnome. Perhaps if those in favour of retaining it were forced to type the acronym properly every time as G.N.O.M.E. they would change their minds.

27. Usability is useful everywhere, especially for tasks that are perceived as Administrator tasks. Most users will continue to be forced to be their own systems Administrator for the foreseeable future.

28. Xscreensaver is secure and reliable. There are efforts to make a gnome-screensaver but JWZ has some comments on why this is not a good idea. A way to reliably store the current users session and switch to the standard login would be better and more consistent than anything else. I mentioned just such an idea privately to Bill Hanneman last week but I am unsure if it is even a practical idea for someone to implement it.

36. Items cannot be accidentally renamed by typing. The icon is a single target. You would probably need to search way back in the mailing list archives for a detailed explanation and justification of this one but I am confident it was well thought out.

38. Talk to Havoc and ask him nicely to reconsider the window placement rules in Metacity. The current scheme isn't bad and this is surpassingly tough to get right. (If you have a big display (developers) and relatively small console windows you will get all four nicely spaced on your desktop, after that you get a fairly basic Cascade layout.)

39. Good point. Being able to easily restore items from the trash would be very useful.

42. In practice I don't believe this is a problem so long as you make sure you don't unplug the USB device before a file transfer has properly finished.

45. The Gnome developers know this sucks. I hope they will take this as one more reason not the get rid of the CD Player which some developers seem determined to do.
Even if it is less than ideal to be directing users to the application rather than providing better file manipulation it is less confusing than expecting users to understand (dare I say grok) an all in one integrated media player or full jukebox software like Rhythmbox.

49. If you think Wizard is bad thank your lucky stars you didn't find one labelled as a Druid. Thankfully that overextended metaphor has been laid to rest and the preferred term is "Assistant" so anything else is bug. Firefox has no excuse not to follow this guideline, unlike Mozilla Seamonkey which tried to keep a more consistent users interface across various platforms Firefox grasped the nettle and has to deal with properly integrating with each platform.

50. Links are good. Hopefully I'll have time to update this and include more links and Matthew will provide a reference to his "Character Encoding" redesign proposal.

53. Evolution needs some devolution. Gradually separating the individual parts while being careful to retain good integration (so I mean not ripping things apart and worrying about it later like Firefox did) should help clear things up and make each part a little more focussed on doing one thing well.

65. Help is depressingly slow and when you are pissed off because you cannot get an application to do what you want the last thing you need is more problems. I think some processing might be getting done at run time but it really should not. The average developer has to rebuild their own project so many times it is tempting to push the work to the end user but it a temptation that really should be avoided.
Nobody likes reading manuals (all generalisations are false, I know smart ass) and it is counts as failure if a user is forced to read the manual. Improving the usability of a program is easier and usually more interesting for most developers than answering the same users questions and writing and than maintaining documentation. It is unfortunate that more developers do not make better use of user feedback and use Frequently Asked Questions as an opportunity to improve their software.

66. Other, General, Miscellaneous, Stuff and similarly vague non-committal terms should not be allowed in technical writing. Abbreviations are nearly as annoying as acronyms, clearly man pages should at least be labelled "Manual Pages" but I'm not sure there is any way to succinctly title or explain "Command Line Start-up Options". This comment could have been funnier if he had said "Marklar".

67. This is a Gnome problem but perhaps Ubuntu should have tried harder to work around it and bundle their own tool for searching the documentation.
When I pointed out the need for searchable help developers got all offended and I got an overly defensive response, instead of politely acknowledging the issue and politely deflecting it with a request for help or more resources.

69. Ubuntu should read your mind and have the colours change telepathically to match your mood. Maybe the colours could reflect the mood of your machine, a calm blue to begin with and then redder as things get busy and almost white hot as your disk thrashes from the combined abuse of Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

70. ???

71. Profit

Okay so I am not serious about the last three but if you want to make a profit I have two words for you: Barbie Linux. Seriously, even if the article might not be serious it is a genuinely good idea. If the success of selling ringtones and backgrounds and other accessories for mobile phone is anything to by then franchising and rebranding has the potential to be extremely profitable.

Enduring Ubuntu got picked up by various sources:
48 Hours with Ubuntu 5.04</b>
48 Hours Enduring Ubuntu
A critical look at Ubuntu or: What companies could learn about PR from open source
If you find any more feel free to post them in the comments.