I'm installing it on a virtual machine right now. Is anyone else downloading or installing it today? I'll post my first impressions soon. But so far it seems unity is the default (or at least they promote it during installation) the default GUI. If it is I'm switching to gnome 3 which was promised on this one. I'm glad Thunderbird is the default email client as I never used evolution or whatever the default one was.
I haven't been able to use ubuntu 11.10 too much but from what little I've been able to use the Operating System I've seen some things I like.
The ubuntu software center received a facelift. It looks much prettier, is better organized, shows ads for the applications and such and now gives you the option to buy some propietary software. The first thing it was showing was the game braid (previously released on the xbox 360 and then offered in PS3 and Steam) running natively on Linux. It was a nice thing to see a (rather) well-known game on sale on the store. I can only hope more software like that shows up. I can see myself buying some of those.
Some icons have been changed and they look better now. The wallpapers included with the OS are beatiful and I'm now using some of them on windows too. while these changes are not too important, they are still nice.
Ubuntu one is easier than ever to use. Just click on the icon of Ubuntu one and enter your email address and password, the app takes care of everything else.
The default graphical user interface is still Unity. It's not much better but some obvious stuff has been fixed. A button for settings is now a default on the left pannel and so is your home folder. But if you didn't like it much at first this new version will not win you over. Some things, while faster, are still a bit slow. Some times jpeg images take quite a few seconds to open and you might still have to do some searches for some stuff that you used to access directly on gnome. Libre office now has its own menus on its own window because it was rather buggy in the previous version.
So far I'm rather pleased with the OS overall but I haven't had time to really mess with it. I plan on trying out the gnome 3 user interface but since there was a lighting storm last Saturday the internet service has been really crappy and I have not really wanted to download it and install it on my laptop. Also, using the OS in a laptop inside a virtual machine is not desirable.
If anyone else has downloaded this OS and used it, please leave some feedback. I'm interested in hearing other people's opinions.