The sorts of troubles I’ve had with Ubuntu upgrades in the past would not have been revealed by testing with the LiveCD, as most of the difficulties have been subtle problems with particular applications. For all but the most zealous, booting from the LiveCD will demonstrate whether your machine can boot up and launch the GUI.

I’m often bemused by the advice, “back up your data first,” because properly backing up data is NOT simple, few individuals or even institutions have effective backup methodologies, and the advice appears so often that it becomes background noise.

All in all, it’s not at all crazy that people did in-place upgrades, and most people who did so did without much difficulty.

usually, their releases are unworkable for 3 months, until they make necessary bug fixing.

i would say that people realize the uglyness of ubuntu with every new release, but fail to move to something else because of lazyness and habit.

having rolling release like pclinuxos is much better solution

Given that, I am finding Kubuntu 9.10 very nice. Everything “just worked” since I installed it in early beta, and I have kept it upgraded ever since with nary a problem. Not even audio or GRUB 2 (two common complaints). Not my kind of disto overall, but very stable and one I’d recommend to non-technical friends without hesitation (though I’d certainly recommend trying the live CD first to make sure it worked with all their hardware!)

The upgraded version limped for a few boots, then stopped functioning completely and needed a clean install. All three clean installs have various problems: suspend and hibernate don’t work, boot up is flaky, X does weird things on no particular schedule. Generally, a hard reset is the only way to get the system back. This is not good. And no, they weren’t all installed from the same CD.

One of the vm’s I’d been running since early alphas, and it had the problems you’d expect, but updates worked and things progressed. Then the update to RC just totally and completely trashed that install in a way I’d never seen before. After a clean install, it’s running beautifully, but I never use suspend on the vm.

Yesterday I downloaded and installed a 64-bit version. Still no suspend that works on that machine, and sometimes booting is fine and sometimes it gives me a flashing command line login that’s nonfunctional. Hard reset required to regain control. All very bizarre.

I’ve been using Ubuntu since Dapper and wouldn’t consider anything else. But I have really never had this number of problems with a new version. Really. It’s not all in my head.

Maybe upstart was let off the reservation before it was ready. Maybe something else is the problem. Either way, though, it makes it hard to tell people to get with the (good) program and ditch Windows.

مدونة