I decided to testdrive Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 (10.04) over the weekend and installed it in parallel to my current version of Karmic (9.10).  It replaced the latest release of Fedora I had tried out.

The install went smoothly.  I manually created a new partition for the base of (/ and /var) and mounted my karmic /home and /opt without reformatting them.   The install was smooth and quick.  The most time seems to be in installing all the language packs.  No idea why it just does not install the ones I am using.