UH-oh Karmic Koala

I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Karmic Koala" on my MacBook Pro. Of course, Ubuntu ships with no proprietary software (copyright fonts, hardware drivers, Adobe Flash Player, etc)... it all must be installed through Internet downloads. All this is based on aptitude, the Debian package manager which uses centralized "repositories" to download everything. I dunno about the rest of you, but Ubuntu's repositories are running painfully slow for me today. Presumably, this is due to all the people downloading the brand new 10.04 LTS today and hammering the repositories all at once as they try to get their proprietary goodies, drivers, the add-on software they want, etc. Understandable. But it sure doesn't make a good impression on the early adopters like me trying it out on day one. Worse, it gives me concerns about the safety of "Cloud Computing" in general. Do I want my documents in a "cloud" where a high-load or bad-server day could render them inaccessible? Or do I want them on my own computer where I'm not depending on the outside world for access to my data? Just a thought... - Mark