linux and freedom

This is not a rant , just a food for thought , a simple observation whichI just come to realize, today seems to be the release date of Ubuntu 10.04 akaLucid Lynx and it has considerable improvements over previous versions but it simply does not work out that way, I normally run new release starting from alpha1 (Alpha 2 in case of Lucid) and although somebody transferring from Karmic will realize the drastic change in terms of performance , themes , the memenu or any other facet, but in my case I have no such feeling , I see the changes but they were more kind of gradual, in form of daily updates, or sometimes distribution updates , so when I was reading this I realized the immense improvement canonical has put to this release, Kudos.