Seeing as I did a complete re-installation rather than an upgrade I half expected that it was going to take me a week or so to get things back to that warm and fuzzy zone. Not so, everything is nicely organized and I’ve actually started re-using some services that sort of fell by the wayside and now feel re-energized and more productive. The combination of Beagle, Gnome Deskbar, Liferea, Mozilla, and Foxylicious plus del.icio.us is a one hell of a force in organizing and perusing through the detrius of my online life.

My desktop is very OSX-y in that I prefer an application bar at the bottom for all my regular tasks and applications and the main menu bar on top and both these panels are set yo autohide to maximize screen real estate. The single most used item for me is on the bottom panel between Liferea and the calculator: Gnome Deskbar. From there I can launch applications, search with Beagle or any of my MyCroft engines, as well as both my normal bookmarks and my del.icio.us ones. It is that damn cool.

This is a good example of what Beagle can do; searching for the word “Books” returns some PDFs, IM conversations, news feeds, applications, and folders. Tied in with the Gnome Deskbar I can also search across my bookmarks and surfing history.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of Rhythmbox as its iTunes inspired interface does little to excite me and, like iTunes, it pretty much sucks for managing large collections. However, the one huge thing going for it is SMB support so I can easily point it at my backup music server (running Ubuntu but only holding 30% of all my music) and have my collection at my fingertips for playback and with native last.fm support I can keep track of all my listening habits.

With a kid on the way I’ve decided to get a little more serious about keeping track the photos I take and I’ve found F-Spot to be very intuitive and adept for that task. Highlights include the slider bar to search photos by date and the tagging feature which helps in providing metatags to group photos across the collection.

Needless to say this release of Ubuntu has taken it to the next level and I’m back to that bubbling feeling of joy when using my laptop. When trees stop falling on my house I have to pull out the old PayPal account and make a donation as the work they and the rest of the OpenSource community are doing is worth paying for.