Congratulations to Canonical and Ubuntu community on release of Ubuntu 8.10!!!
I’m proudly using Ubuntu 8.10 on my mbp (it works great) with a beautiful Dust theme, and even more beautiful GDM theme WillWill. (there’s also Willbex theme available).
The most interesting thing from my POV in this release is a great community riot around the theme for the new Ubuntu release which was strengthen by this set of mockups promoted at brainstorm.ubuntu.com and digg.
I find it a good sign of the community health how strong reaction this topic received and I’m a bit disappointed by lack of public discussion between broad community and people in charge of the project. I believe we’re doing a better job on this in Mozilla and I hope it’ll be a lesson for Ubuntu project similar to what we got with Firefox 1.0 Theme switch issue.
Bottom line is that I believe this energy motivated Mark to hire designers, usability and user experience experts. It’s always good to see community getting so energetic around something *they* think is important, and I believe open projects model makes it especially effective in a longer run.
Once more, congrats on the release guys! 
But still, they didn’t manage to provide a new default theme for Intrepid as was originally planned. I hope something will happen for Jaunty.