It is apparent that the NVIDIA drivers need to be removed for Compiz to work so the regression for the Intel drivers must have been fixed.

As for the panel icon backgrounds, there is a debian bug report on a similar issue but the CheckGmail faq says their icon cannot be transparent (interestingly since it was in Karmic). I’ve also read forum posts and Launchpad posts that seem to indicate the Liferea icon background was fixed.

So I am still hanging on, I can use the Human theme and the background issue is indistinguishable. I just didn’t want bright gray panels distracting the rest of the desktop. Still this seems to not be an Ubuntu or specifically a Lucid issue as much as it is either a Gnome issue or an application specific issue.

Yes the system is faster, but Karmic wasn’t slow at all. There isn’t anything new that I would consider even remotely useful in this release so Back to Karmic I will go until I find a new distro that doesn’t break video every other release.

That said, I do like the appearance changes–except for the position of the close button.

With Ati Radeon 3470, Ubuntu doesn’t work well at all:
- without the proprietary fglrx driver, there is no bootsplash (which in itself wouldn’t be so bad, since it boots very fast, but also it doesn’t shutdown), but it moves pretty well once inside Gnome; Possible solution: to enable nomodeset=1 in grub (search the ubuntu forums for details)
- with the proprietary fglrx driver from the ubuntu repository, the bootsplash appears (although with corrupted image), shutdown also works, but 2d performance is awful (in metacity), and 3d with compiz enabled is slower than it was in Karmic.