For those early adopters among us who have installed the first release of MeeGo on their netbooks – which includes me – today is an exciting day (depending on how excited you get about incrimental software updates, I suppose). Today MeeGo launch the first update to their Core Software Platform & Netbook User Experience – according to the installer I’m staring at this update is Core Version 1.0.1.2, or thereabouts.
MeeGo claim they’ve squashed over 100 bugs with this software update, improves performance across the board (USB device connection time is down from 5 seconds to 1 second), added visual improvements, and an “Enhanced netbook window manager”.
First the good stuff – I noticed upon booting the new version was they’ve replaced the horrible janky Chrome icon they used before, which is great news because it really bugged me. The boot time seems improved and there’s a noticeable snappiness to proceedings. Not much has been added functionality-wise, it’s still missing the all-important Facebook sync in the web accounts section and it still doesn’t have a reset button that I can find, but it’s getting there. The MyZones ta remains a great piece of design – there’s no need for a desktop if you use a netbook like I do (i.e. mostly in the cloud), so having a recent usage / social media aggregator is exactly what I want.
Next the bad – after I rebooted post-update there was a whole lot of crashing going on – I had it running for a almost an hour and had multiple crash messages, so many in fact that it crashed the crash reporting software! I rebooted for a second time and this seems to have fixed most of the problems, but it was nonetheless disconcerting to have this happen straight after an update.
MeeGo is developing nicely and certainly with great speed – remember it was only a month and a half ago this software was launched. My main complaint at this point is that it still doesn’t feel like a version 1.0 – it very much feels like a beta. A few aspects of the OS, such as the gadgets panel, are incomplete almost to the point of obsolescence, while some others, like the MyZones panel, give us exciting glimpses of what this OS could become.
Source – MeeGo Blog
P.S. Remember MeeGo fans – the handset version launched last week too!
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