Jon Fingas for Engadget:

For all of the many directions Ubuntu One’s cloud storage has gone, it hasn’t headed the Mac’s way. Official clients have been the province of Linux devotees (naturally, Ubuntu is recommended) and their Windows friends across the aisle. A newly available Mac beta puts all three major desktop platforms on an even keel, very literally — the OS X port is almost identical to what you’d get in Linux or Windows, including a few rough points where other interface concepts clash.

Ubuntu One is a cloud service integrated into the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Similar to iCloud, SugarSync, Dropbox and other services, Ubuntu One lets you synchronize data between multiple devices. The service is free to sign up for and gives you 5GB of storage (additional storage is available for a fee).

After some time away from it, I recently installed Ubuntu 12.0.4 as a virtual machine on one of my Macs, and I’m really pleasantly surprised with how far it’s come. Canonical deserves a lot of credit for turning Linux into a user-friendly alternative to OS X and Windows.