My first run through the Hardy beta with the Ugly Little Laptop is proceeding, more or less, as expected. A lot of the old issues (I’m not calling them bugs) are still around, most notably the terrible performance in the full Ubuntu Gnome suite.
But before you Ubuntu-haters grab that as some sort of signal that Hardy is terrible, relax: At 450Mhz, just about everything is terrible on this machine.
I still get a windowframe effect because the default color depth is set too high, and system speed is still sluggish and slow. I also have some strange behavior where Gnome’s network applet thinks I have no network, even though the card is sensed and working … I just have to tell dhclient to ask for an IP address.
On the other hand, the startup seems faster — I’m reaching the login in under 2.5 minutes, which is a big jump compared to 7.04. And of course, Firefox 3 is faster than version 2, an opinion that seems to be shared by almost everyone. It’s just not much faster on this machine. 
So I’m looking around and seeing what ballast can be thrown overboard. Actually, from my current perspective, I’m wondering what can’t be thrown overboard. 
you could, just in name of science, compile webkitgtk and midori and see how it behaves in the ugly little laptop
Midori is included in hardy, fwiw. It is not nearly complete as Firefox, so it will probably be faster, but i suspect as it grows and gets even more usable, it may get slower…
i did upgrade my ubuntu too from gutsy to hardy and i like the new firefox, it’s faster and lighter than version 2
anyway… i prefer a fresh install of ubuntu… i’m waiting for the stable version (or maybe for the june release…)