Four Island

The Story Of How Starla Can Never Upgrade Her OS Painlessly (Yes, an IRC joke. Don't you love those?)

Ubuntu and I, we go way back. We have history. Ever since I fell out of my chair at 2am because Ubuntu was able to identify my wireless network card when Gentoo and Debian couldn't, I've been a solid Ubuntu user. However, there is one part of our history that always goes wrong: upgrading. As detailed in my last Ubuntu post, my Ubuntu upgrade process can be rather horrendous. In fact, Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 may have been the worst upgrade experience for me, but after that, everything was lovely. Ubuntu 9.10 worked out fairly well for me, after I fixed the mouse problem.

This time, it appears that the completely opposite has occured. When I started to upgrade Ubuntu, as expected, I was having trouble. The upgrade failed a few times due to my dismal Internet connection and Ubuntu's busy servers and eventually, the Update Manager failed to show the Upgrade button. I switched to using the command line, but after a while, that stopped working too. Eventually, I decided to do what I had done for Ubuntu 9.10: download the alternative CD, mount it and use the packages on it as a foothold. While that worked for me last time, it still took a couple of days to download the rest of the needed packages.

Not this time. As soon as I started the upgrade, I got "30 minutes remaining." O_O. A half an hour? Only a half an hour? Impossible. It couldn't be. But it was. 30 minutes later, all 1014 packages were downloaded and had begun to install. It was amazing. I don't believe I've ever undergone such a fast Ubuntu upgrade.

However, this seemingly amiable upgrade may have been a warning of what was to come. Needless to say, Ubuntu 10.04 has not been very nice to me. Let's go over the specifics, shall we?

• One of Ubuntu 10.04's "new features" is a new boot process which is supposed to make booting much faster. For me? My computer definitely takes longer to boot than it did before, which is annoying considering how long it took before.
• And that's if it's a completely normal boot. Two days ago, when I started my computer, fsck ran because it hadn't checked my disk in a while and it took TWENTY MINUTES. YES. Don't blame it on the large amount of data on my drive--after twenty minutes, the progress had frozen at 90% and I was eventually forced to restart the computer. This, I think, is ridiculous.
• Previously, applications that hid in the system tray could be restored with a simple click of the icon, while right-clicking made a context-menu appear. Now, several Ubuntu programs like Rhythmbox and Transmission instead show the context-menu on left click, and nothing on right-click, forcing you to use a context-menu to open your program. Not a show-stopper, but definitely annoying.
• When I close my computer screen and open it back up later, EVERYTHING STARTS FLASHING. It's insane, makes it impossible to see what you're doing and lasts a while. Why is this? Does Ubuntu think that my programs aren't bright enough?
• Something in the upgrade has broken my copy of gnome-globalmenu (which I use to simulate a Mac-like menu bar) and now, certain programs like Gwibber do not work. This is disappointing, especially as Ubuntu 10.04 has a lot of added features for Gwibber with the addition of the MeMenu.

There are definitely more problems, but they're hiding from me. Anyway, I hope that the next version of Ubuntu (oh god, it's 6 months away....) is better.