Love/Hate: Distribution Upgrades

With the scheduled release of Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" next month, I find myself wondering if I actually want to go through the process of upgrading. So far, here has been my experiences with Ubuntu's distribution upgrades:

Edgy (6.10) to Feisty (7.04): This was wonderful. Bug fixes everywhere, everything looked a lot better and everything was overall easier to use. With this one I did a complete re-install of Ubuntu, mainly because I was new to Ubuntu and had messed up the Edgy install pretty bad.

Feisty (7.04) to Gutsy (7.10): Not so good. The interface changed a fair bit, so doing some of the simple things that I had done before were now in different locations, so until I found those new locations I was stuck doing things the *shudder* command-line way. Of the new things added to Gutsy, I find that I don't really use many of them:

• Fast-user switching? Nope, I'm the only person who uses my computer. When I visit my parents, I found that whenever people used the fast-user switching it was annoying because their processes would slow the whole computer down -- especially when they left BitTorrent running. Or their MSN would be on, giving me annoying MSN noises. Fortunately they have this thing that lets you force log them out.


• Compiz Fusion? Oh I love it, but I keep it off now since it tends to slow things down. I don't really like waiting the half second for the fancy animation to go through when I'm switching through menus or all that. So effectively this addition was not really anything important, just penis envy of Windows Aero.


• Tracker? I keep it off. Never use it, never need to use it. I keep my files fairly organized anyway, and I know where I put things 99.9% of the time.

The install of Gutsy was also painful, I spent two days (!!!) downloading through Synaptic only to have it crap out halfway through updating all the packages. So this meant I had to then download the ISO and install it myself because the Feisty install was now some twisted hybrid of Feisty and Gutsy.

My biggest beef with Gutsy is that I am forced to use it, because the Feisty repositories don't seem to be updated with all the newer software. My girlfriend is still on Feisty (because Gutsy doesn't support her hardware, weird much?) and can't get a lot of the software updates that I have since she still uses the Feisty repositories. I suppose it's probably possible to change the sources for aptitude, but I tend to avoid editing anything in the /etc folder in fear of destroying my computer.