I eagerly await this release. Hardy Heron, in my experience using the beta, has been a lot more consistent and stable than its predecessor, the current stable release Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). It also has support for a wider variety of hardware right out of the "box" (including my Audigy 2 ZS Notebook sound card, which requires manual configuration of the ALSA drivers in previous releases). All in all, even in beta, this release is polished and robust.

If, as I expect, 8.04 acts the same as previous upgrades, you will not have to install from scratch, but should be able to upgrade relatively painlessly.

Depending on your settings, I believe the update notification will automatically push notification of a Distribution Upgrade (just as app update notifications are pushed automatically) - er, technically, the update notification app pulls the upgrade info; but you get the idea, I'm sure.

If, however, 8.04 is released and your update notification does not indicate that you have a Distribution Upgrade available, then you can still find it through the Update Manager. I use Kubuntu, so I don't exactly remember where on the menu the Update Manager is, but it should be in the same place as the rest of the Admin Utilities. Start Update Manager (requires sudo password), click "Check for Updates", and you should see a notification that a Distribution Upgrade is available.

That should be all there is to it!

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Dell*buntu Inspiron 1420n, running Kubuntu 8.04

I've been testing 8.02 beta on my work computer and have no problems so far. Ubuntu isn't my favorite distro, but the company is considering a move from Windows to a *nix system that is still easy for our opperations department to use. As with most distros of *nix, upgrading to a new one, it usally very easy. Of course you used to have to get packages and manually type the commands, with the new KDE and GNOME heavy OS(meaning more x service and less backend) they have made the upgrading process extremely easy.