I just upgraded my homely home Linux box running Ubuntu. Man have they smoothed this process out!! Went from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope in less than a half hour, no muss no fuss. Having FiOS to make the download of 200+ MB of packages a 5 minute task also helps.
Since I’m an infrequent Linux tinkerer, this isn’t a huge deal. There are a couple of major wins though. First, Python 2.6 is now part of the standard distribution. This makes the most rock solid, yet latest featured, version of my favorite programming language available. I’m also guessing that a lot of Python packages are updated as well, meaning quite a few less source builds and installs by hand.
Second, Erlang and RabbitMQ have updated or new Ubuntu packages. Experimenting with a production quality, open source, message queuing server is now a piece of cake. I sort of have a sense that with the commoditization trend of message queuing and the growth of real time notification on the Web, having working message queuing knowledge will be essential to successful programmers.