Technically Brasero should be discussed under the Gnome 2.26 heading, because the program is officially part of the Gnome desktop experience. And like Gnome itself, Brasero is maturing quite nicely. The big change in Ubuntu 9.04 is that it has entirely replaced Gnome's built-in CD/DVD Creator, that formerly lived on the Places menu. In this beta release, there are two menu entries for Brasero on the Applications menu: one under Sound & Video, which starts the full Brasero interface, and one under the System Tools menu, that starts Nautilus in CD/DVD recorder mode. When the Write To Disc button is hit, after you've dragged across the files you want to burn, Nautilus hands over to Brasero to actually create the disc.

Conclusion

In his announcement of the 9.04 release, Mark Shuttleworth only laid down that were of interest as far as end-users were concerned: faster booting and integration with web apps. The first nail has been squarely hit on the head, but the second seems to have been entirely ignored. Firefox doesn't have Google Gears installed, for example, and the interesting , that "wraps" online applications to make them appear like local apps, hasn't been integrated.

It doesn't even appear that the version of Firefox supplied is the exciting new 3.1 release--the version number supplied with the beta is 3.0.7 (although admittedly 3.1 is still in beta). Personally, I believe that online applications are going to become more and more important in future, so I'm disappointed that Ubuntu isn't making any progress in this direction. There's a real chance to make a stake on virgin ground here, and it's land that Microsoft and Apple don't even know exist yet. Still, here's hoping for the Ubuntu 9.10 release in October. (Until then, anybody wholly committed to the online application experience can use , which takes Ubuntu and adds-in exactly what Shuttleworth requested.)

Should you upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 when it's released? To be honest, I don't see any reason not too. But I also have trouble of thinking of reasons why you should. With each new release of Ubuntu, it's becoming harder and harder for me to make a genuine recommendation, and this is something that worries me. The only compelling reason I can think of making the upgrade to 9.04 is the faster boot times, and the possibility of experimenting with ext4 file systems. Other than that, you're perhaps better sticking with 8.10, or even the 8.04 LTS release, which despite being a year old, remains a strong and stable release that's perfect for most users. With the recent raft of , it just gets better and better. I use 8.04 LTS on most of my computers.