Ahmad Yasser wrote:

I will definitely check out whatever GNOME 3 has in store

MrJones2015 wrote:

“make it as shitty as Vista” well its KDE, what did you expect?

OMG! GNOME 3 is going to look like Vista too!
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/09/gnome-3-quick-visual-tour.html

“make it as shitty as Vista” well its KDE, what did you expect?

I actually went the GNOME -> KDE 4 route, but I will definitely check out whatever GNOME 3 has in store

@ Alphast:

To be fair, Windows doesn’t work out of the box either. Let me bring up my experience with old Inspiron 600m laptop here. When I installed Windows XP on the thing it booted in 800×600 resolution with:

- broken video drivers
- no audio
- no ethernet
- no wifi

I tried Ubuntu with the same machine and everything other than wifi worked out of the box, So it really depends.

And this is the first in 4 consecutive upgrades that ended up in such a spectacular fail. Yeah, this system started off as hoary or dapper or something like that – I don’t even remember anymore.

@ Stefanie:

I will attest to that. On linux there is usually a way to get a piece of hardware working. In worst case scenario you’ll have to compile something. On windows the drivers are usually there, provided by manufacturer until they are not.

For example, I have a Vista 64 bit box at home that refuses to work with an older Epson scanner. Epson released Vista 32 drivers for this model like a year ago, but they won’t work with the 64 bit version. And no one at Epson cares because it is an old piece of hardware.

Oh, and that one time I had a lovely HP all-in-one-printer driver that decided to take up 100% of CPU time, and refused to let it go until you killed it’s resident process.

copperfish wrote:

“Never, ever, ever install .10 releases. They always suck. Only ever install .04 releases.”

Seriously, I think I should frame this and hang it above my desk so I don’t forget. All the other upgrades were to non .10 versions.

@ Ahmad Yasser:

Yeah, we Kubuntu users are second class citizens in Ubuntuland. I’m so used to the ‘buntu way of doing things though that I’m not sure I’d be happy on an RPM based system like Mandriva or OpenSUSE. I might just switch to Gnome one day.

The main reason you had this much trouble is because you’re using Kubuntu.
The ONLY, and I mean ONLY usable one out of the three is Ubuntu. The other 2 are jokes IMO, just like Kubuntu and their KDE implementation.
If you really want to try out KDE 4.3, use a REAL KDE distro like Mandriva or OpenSUSE.

Absolutely no Nvidia issues with a clean install of Ubuntu Karmic on a T61 ThinkPad with exactly the same Quadro 140M hardware. Nvidia mobile hardware drivers suck on Windows and Linux so @Alphast it isn’t purely a Lunix thing. I have far fewer driver issues with a clean Ubuntu install vs. Windows 7.

That said I broke the Ubuntu rule:

“Never, ever, ever install .10 releases. They always suck. Only ever install .04 releases.”

On a clean install on hardware that worked perfectly in Jaunty:

Nautilus hangs regularly (thumbnail related).
Suspend works, but power manager ignores battery vs. plugged in profiles.
Sound was fine in Jaunty, but there are issues with Karmic.

And on and on….when I get the chance it’s a backup and downgrade for me.

To be honest, I’ve always had more trouble with drivers under Windows than under Linux. Of course it all depends on the hardware but for me 9.10 felt like a big leap forward. For the first time my eee pc was working out of the box, function keys, suspend and webcam included. Everything just feels much smoother. It’s surprising that there is still trouble with nVidia card, but I guess a clean install would have avoided the problem? Maybe I’m just lucky but upgrading has alwasy been a painless experience for me.

You know guys, this is the main number 2 reason why Linux won’t be adopted any time soon by the larger public (the number 1 is called video games, but you all knew that). It rarely works fine out of the box (if I may use such a weird expression for online repositories) and practically never upgrade easily. Windows sucks (we all agree here, I suppose), especially Vista. But it works on most hardware. And yes, I know there are hoops of exceptions, fancy hardware and stuff. But it won’t hose your ATI or Nvidia display. At least not on a standard install…

@ Steve:

It’s funny but the previous upgrade gave me absolutely no trouble. It was quick, easy and painless. This one was a train wreck and it should not have been. My video card was fully supported via the proprietary drivers in the last 4 releases. I did not expect it to break this time.

On the upside, I was pleasantly surprised that my sound card worked right out of the box. I had to jimmy it after every upgrade so far. This time it just worked.

Chris Wellons wrote:

If “Ubuntu” is an ancient African word meaning “couldn’t configure Debian”, then what’s the word for “couldn’t configure Ubuntu”?

Obviously the word is OSX – which is ancient African for “I can’t figure out Linux for the life of me, but I’m sure as hell not running Vista”.

Chris Wellons wrote:

Why would anyone, especially the KDE people, think it’s a good idea to store e-mail in the .kde directory?

I know, it’s ridiculous but I guess this is sort of a tradition for email clients. Thunderbird does the same fucking thing, hiding your email archives in the .mozilla folder.

Craig A. Betts wrote:

I was able to fix the NVidia by backing up my original xorg.conf, reinstalling the latest Nvidia driver, and replacing the xorg.conf with my original. No other magic required.

Yep, that was my plan too but as it can be see above, it did not work. No clue why, because every single previous upgrade went smoothly and them most I had to do is to click a GUI button to install the proprietary nVidia drivers.

Craig A. Betts wrote:

Fixing VirtualBox has been the same whenever a new kernel comes out, I just reapply the package which recompiles the kernel modules. I had a lot of issues using the VirtualBox binaries in the debian repositories, so I always download the one I need directly from Sun.

Same here. The package maintainers for VirtualBox do not keep up with the kernel updates so if you update your system regularly, the app will break every time there is a kernel upgrade and you have to wait for them to repackage.

I found that most of the time all I had to do to make it work again was running:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

This always re-compiled the kernel module and applied it for me. Only this time it didn’t work giving me some cryptic error messages. Eventually I resolved it by downloading the newest release from Sun and re-installing it manually via dpkg.

Sorry you had so much trouble. My upgrade was pretty painless.

I was able to fix the NVidia by backing up my original xorg.conf, reinstalling the latest Nvidia driver, and replacing the xorg.conf with my original. No other magic required.

Fixing VirtualBox has been the same whenever a new kernel comes out, I just reapply the package which recompiles the kernel modules. I had a lot of issues using the VirtualBox binaries in the debian repositories, so I always download the one I need directly from Sun. I have not had an issue since.

The only other things to break were things that you would expect, like anything you compiled under 9.04. I had to jump some hoops to get my vmware-view-open-client to recompile, but got there none the less. It also broke my SheepShaver, but some supporting libraries have changed (I had grabbed an RPM and converted with alien, so I expected this error to happen).

Now, our systems differ in that mine is Ubuntu, not Kbuntu. Not sure if that had anything to do with it, but I doubt it.