Congratulations to the Ubuntu community on the release of Ubuntu 8.04! I am currently downloading a copy of Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 Remix and preparing to make a jump from KDE3 to 4, which should give a modern looking computing experience anyway. I've been playing with the beta version of the Remix CD for a while now, and KDE4 seems to have improved quite a lot since I first blogged about it back in January. I'll about the experience of installing it on my laptop in the next few days, and since seeing this video on YouTube I'm tempted to install it on my Asus EEE PC as well! Ubuntu is a project I much admire, the name is an African term for "humanity to others", a concept they bring right into their community through the use of a Code of Conduct which encourages participants to treat each other with respect. This has resulted in an atmosphere on sites related to their project, for example the Ubuntu Forums, which I think is quite welcoming to people.

You will notice the letters LTS in some of the titles, this stands for Long Term Support edition, so you will get three years of fixes and security updates on desktop editions and five years on server editions. So this means you could just install it and happily use your computer for quite a long time without having to think about upgrading, this could be especially interesting for businesses.

There has a slight change in the line up of Ubuntu versions for you to choose from, they are now as follows:

• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop edition - Features the GNOME desktop environment
• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server edition - a version for runing on your servers, easy to install such things as the LAMP stack
• Kubuntu 8.04 - Like Ubuntu but uses the KDE desktop system, version 3, which has been aroud for some time and is very stable
• Kubuntu 8.04 KDE4 Remix - Like the above but uses the quite new KDE4 system for a more cutting edge computing experience.
• Xubuntu 8.04 - Like Ubuntu but uses the XFCE desktop system. This is designed to be less demanding on computer resources making it a good choice for older computer systems.

Edubuntu is missing from this list as it has been restructered into an add on CD for Ubuntu and became Ubuntu Education Edition. Hopefully this change will bring about more of an awareness of Ubuntu and Linux generally in the education sector. There are other distributions derived from Ubuntu as well.

This choice might seem a little bewildering, but it is not all that bad. You can easily switch between the different versions of Ubuntu without having to do a fresh install, so if you are new the best is probably to have a look at the sites above and see which one appeals the most.