This time, I chose the upgrade using the Update Manager. Naturally, due to the massive competition from thousands of others doing the same thing, it took five hours over my cable connection. That’s no big deal. The jump from 9.10 to 10.04 was otherwise pretty smooth.
I am in no position to test everything, nor even the most commonly used applications. That’s not how I work. However, I did test the things I use. So the upgrade-in-place left my default browser — Chrome — working just fine. Stuff I built on Karmic still works fine in Lucid. The upgrade picked up everything I had installed from the standard repositories. Yet, not all of my settings were preserved, and a few things were downright broken.
We have already heard much about the changed window frame buttons, but I didn’t get any frames at all on first reboot. Indeed, the primary graphic display took a long time to come up on my fast card. I did appreciate not having to fool with the Fglrx driver installation, but I had to go and select a theme, because no part of the default, about which everyone was kvetching, appeared. Nothing, and no multiple desktops, etc. Once I chose the Human theme, everything was pretty much back to normal.
I despise the Gnome Screensaver. It is a badly crippled version of the old Xscreensaver, lacking some critical fine granularity in options, so I usually substitute. This time I actually had to uninstall the Gnome version, because it insisted on running after I killed it repeatedly, and disabled it in my options. It still came up. It’s gone now.
Evolution reminds me every time this is GNOME. It hangs, some frequently used options are hidden, some keystrokes are broken, and so forth. Though it’s not the best browser, Opera is a superior mail client. That’s what I use.
Alsa reads my onboard chipset fine, but does less to accommodate than the previous release. I had to add several lines to get the minimum controls in the mixer. And why Lucid decided I had to have a /dev/fd0 when I never had one before, I can’t comprehend. The error created massive logs before I noticed it.
There were other minor glitches, but it was pretty much worth upgrading. For those of you who insist I should file bug reports, you need to understand my history. Apparently I am utterly incompetent in writing them, because over the past decade, they were all deleted, on every buglist I joined. From the GNOME folks especially, I’ve been told to get lost. It’s possible I annoyed someone important, though I have no idea how. Thus, I don’t even get the faint moment of warm glow knowing I’ve helped others. Besides, the developers have no interest, and are sometimes hostile, if you dare to request a fix for the previous release. Everything is rolled into the next release, and I am somehow evil for daring to suggest anything different.
So every OS stinks, and right now, Lucid Lynx stinks least. We’ll see how long that lasts, because I really like the idea of the LTS.
