Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Smoothest Ubuntu version Upgrade

I have to say it. Smoothest Ubuntu version Upgrade ever!

Last night when i upgraded my installation of 12.10LTS(Long Term Support) to the spanking new 14.04LTS went through with the minor-est of issues!



Backstory: 
In the past i've always wound up doing a clean wipe and fresh install for each version.. because everytime i did an upgrade.. all hell would break loose .. drivers would stop working, applications would get corrupted.. and the horror of all horrors  GRUB would get screwed up. Of course the major complications would usually be blamed on the fact that this was usually a dual boot laptops.. but then i've now had a desktop with Ubuntu running exclusively for the last 6 years.. with more or less the same issues during an upgrade.

Back to the present(or rather last night):
So yesterday i downloaded the latest LTS version of Ubuntu .
Now i don't have the kind of net connection(Airtel is so bad some days) i can trust a big download on.. 
so i went to the alternate downloads page and grabbed the torrent.
Ubuntu is available via torrent and with more languages

Once it downloaded, I promptly created a live usb drive of Ubuntu 14.04LTS using Lili(Linux Live USB Creator) .. then waited for the end of the day when all my work was done, and my primary machine(dual boot) was free for some shenanigans.


On booting with the usb it detected that i already had an older LTS version installed, and offered me the option to upgrade it. There was a warning that some apps may need to be re-installed.

The entire upgrade then happened in under 20minutes. And i was logging into Trusty Tahr.

The only apps that i've had to re-install so far were Blender and Vlc Player.

the only real issue i've heard of is the privacy one described in detail at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/22/ubuntu_14_04_review/
In a nutshell, the Unity's desktop search includes Amazon integration. Not something i'm personally worried about since i have the kindle installed on most of my devices anyway.


So is it worth it?

The changes from 12.01 are visually pretty great.. the only performance thing i see is that unity is less buggy and .. for the fellow 3d modellers.. Blender was able to display models with Matcap materials with virtually no lag.. ie: the graphics drivers work great with my Dell XPS L502X. 

However 
1) if your not using unity.. and have opted for something else(cinnamon or others)
2) your not having any graphics drivers issues.. 
3) arn't that interested in the new ui refinements

Then stay with what youve got. If it aint broken.. 

if however you arn't on an LTS(5 year support) version of Ubuntu, 
this is the one to get.

Go get it right now.



No comments: