Linux.com has reviewed the new releases from Mandriva and Ubuntu, both generally favourably. Mandriva's package management system(s) still appear to be letting it down, and Ubuntu "Edgy" disappoints for it's lack of "edginess". If you've used either, leave your impressions in the comments below.
Personally I found Edgy's lack of new features disappointing. I found the Tomboy notes application rather cute, but hardly worth 3rd place on a list of new features (The new splash screen came first!).
Of the two products I have running constantly on my computer, I'm at a loss to find any new features in either GNOME 2.16 or Firefox 2.0 really worthy of note. Call me cynical, but I suspect that if Microsoft hadn't released IE7, I'd now be using the same web browser under the name Firefox 1.6.
A major concern for me was the increased strain that Edgy put on my five year old desktop PC. It had been claimed that GNOME 2.16 would include significant performance optimisations, but on a system with only 256MB of RAM, these optimisations seem to have only served to make a bad situation worse. It had been getting slower with every new release of Ubuntu, but Edgy was the final nail in the coffin. Fortunately, replacing GNOME with the XFCE desktop environment, via the xubuntu-desktop set of packages, brought back the relatively snappy performance of a year ago, and I was surprised to find that I lost very little functionality in the migration from the GNOME desktop (apart from the aforementioned Tomboy). XFCE's weather applet, unlike GNOME's, actually works for Coffs Harbour!
Since the previous version ("Dapper") is slated for 'long term support', with provision of security upgrades for a longer period of time than Edgy will have, this is the first Ubuntu upgrade that I wouldn't recommend to everybody, or even most users. However, to be fair, this can be seen as a result of the short space of time (three months) since the last release, and the increasing maturity of the system leaving fewer obvious paths for rapid improvement.