I upgraded both of my laptops to the final pre-release version of Ubuntu 9.04 yesterday and am happy to report that they are both running great. The upgrade on my 16" Sager was as smooth as possible - just download the new packages and reboot. On my netbook (10" Asus Eeepc) I had to jump through a few hoops installing wifi drivers and ACPI scripts but it was all well-documented on the eeeuser and Ubuntu forums.

I initially installed the array.org kernel but was having more trouble connecting to wifi than with the generic Ubuntu kernel so I've switched to Ubuntu's offering. Yay Ubuntu for sorting out issues for netbooks so quickly that we don't even need a custom kernel anymore!

The splash and login screens are nicely updated and one of my pet peeves has been addressed - the operation of the volume control. It now operates horizontally and has a button to bring up the mixer and most importantly it disappears when you move the mouse attention elsewhere. And it seems to be much faster on my netbook. Everything seems about 30% faster! Dunno what's going on there but I'm not complaining.

I'm really looking forward to starting to play around with this version of Ubuntu's hooks into cloud computing with its support for open clouds & Amazon EC2.