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Do people ever get sick of the upgrade and try it thing? I know I did a while back. I would try out the latest version of this or that and in the end I spent so much time installing and tweaking that I was never just using the system. Everyone talks about how Linux is ready for the desktop but everyone is so busy installing the latest and greatest I wonder if they really have the time to actually do things with it.

That said, I really liked Dapper when it was released and for the first time in a number of years I actually thought I could maybe go back to using Linux as my primary desktop system at home. In the end, I still ran across too many little annoyances. Don't get me wrong, I've been using Linux in some form since '98, but I still don't think it's nearly as strong as a desktop system as Windows or OS X. Call me old but I truly still miss the feel and simplicity of Gnome 1.

EDIT: It should also be noted that I will give FC6 and Edgy Eft a try

Edited 2006-10-27 21:22

I do it because i like to try new things just like I updated to each release of VIsta. My main install though is a Windows XP SP2 and a Gentoo install that is always up to date thanks to the portage tree.

I don't think the poster is actually upgrading every instant any more (they pretty much say that) but I don't think that was their complaint.

The complaint I saw in that post was against the "oh, you gotta try this new release of this distro" culture... wondering where the rest of us get all this time to test out five or six distros a month/week (devoting 10 minutes to install, yes... but what about configuring, tweaking, testing, breaking...).

Check Distrowatch; they have eight or so releases a week, it'd even be a load if you only tested all the releases and beta versions of the biggest distros.

The poster apparently just wants a nice, pretty system that they can sit there and say 'there it is'.

Of course nobody's holding a gun to your head and telling you to upgrade. But the general mindset on Linux forums and OSNews is the hard and fast life of the perpetual updater who's always looking for the new and better OS technology, and THAT seems to be the issue.

I recognize the sentiment as what drove me away from Gentoo- I was tired of a high-maintenance system where being 'up-to-date' meant syncing and installing every day (or putting it off and having truly massive compile-times, and then things might break, and then...) One step was trying to get away from the 'must be up to date' mindset, the other was finding a distro where someone did (nearly) all the configuring for me (Ubuntu)

Between a troll and a brain fart, I'd choose brain fart, or preferably mild sarcasm. I don't think they're terribly ill-informed or unenlightened.

Way to make an opinion about my post, write a long accusatory post and call me an uninformed troll. Brilliant.

I modded you up for sport anyway.

One of the points of my post, which you clearly missed (but many others seemed to get as I'm modded 5 where as you're -2), is that I'm tired of the upgrade train and I'm curious if anyone else is too. The problem isn't the amount of time it takes to actually install the OS, it's the customization that needs to occur afterwards and then using a system long enough to have a real good feel of how truly usable a system is.

That's the part the takes time.

If you can install a system and instantly have it fully working to your tastes without configuring anything then kudos to you.

Now to answer your finely worded bullet points.

1. Of course I know that a person is not forced to upgrade. Where did I say otherwise?

2. Don't assume that I don't know what multi-boot is or that I've never done it before. By the way your post reads you lead me to believe that I've multi-booted and used more OS's than you have even heard of.

3. I pretty much touched on this before. Installing the system isn't the point. To take it a bit further though, installing a system and then not also bringing on your files over and then using the system for a while doing all the things you normally do on a desktop system just isn't a good test.

4. WOW!! I'm living under such a huge rock that I had no idea that distros release new versions all of the time!! If only I had known!! I wouldn't have said, "gee, is anyone else sick of the upgrade train??" Thanks for setting the record straight and making me look so stupid!

But seriously what are you talking about? First you're railing me because I claim people are installing this stuff on production systems, then you're railing me because installing or upgrading once a year isn't that often. So which is it?

5. Where did you read that I don't use Linux on the desktop because distros release so often? I don't use Linux on the desktop for a number of reasons. I called them small annoyances.

"The problem isn't the amount of time it takes to actually install the OS, it's the customization that needs to occur afterwards and then using a system long enough to have a real good feel of how truly usable a system is."

If you don't format your /home partition, most of your customizations should follow when you upgrade your system. That's what I did when I upgraded from Dapper to Edgy and it was both quick and painless.

I don't think two upgrades a year is pushing it, personally...

About the little annoyances...they're exactly the reason I ditched Windows. To me, Windows is a lot more annoying that Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu actually)...though of course YMMV.

I can relate to that. Although for me, I have pretty much used Linux as my primary desktop during this time. My motivation has always been to see if the next version got me any closer to Linux utopia. In recent months or so, Linux has gotten good enough that I'm losing some of that motivation to upgrade. This is a positive reflection on the state of things. Things work well enough that the pain of backing up, redoing all of my configs and preferences and reinstalling almost isn't worth it. But, I say almost, 'cause I just downloaded fedora and edgy this week.

everyone is so busy installing the latest and greatest I wonder if they really have the time to actually do things with it.

You hit it right on the spot, man! That's exactly the reason that - after a lot of experimenting around ... - a year ago I finally arrived at Debian stable (of all things), and am happy staying there.

I don't have time to upgrade or try different distros. So after trying out a number of different distros a couple of years ago, I made a decision to stick with Ubuntu and stop spending my time distro-hopping (that's fine as a hobby, but I don't have time). I've stuck with Ubuntu ever Warty, upgraded when new releases came out (a very simple matter), and been happy. I had been a Windows user for years before that (and DOS before that, and CP/M on Apple][ before that, etc.) and would never go back to Windows. And this is on my primary laptop which I use all day at work, on a network where almost everyone else uses Windows, and and in the evenings for personal use.

I used to do that. I was a tweaker that could never just leave a piece of software alone. Then I realised that I'd spend dozens of hours in front of the computer ... but never actually accomplish or learn anything.

I've standardised on FreeBSD and Debian, and I don't upgrade / tweak unless absolutely necessary. I find I'm much more productive now that I'm not on the upgrade-treadmill.

I'll keep abreast of developments in other distros/OSes, but I'm not inclined to try them anymore.

I go through phases where I like to try various operating systems. Not just different Linux distributions, but I'll also play with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Zeta, BeOS, OS/2, React OS, Solaris x86, and many more.

But I never touch my "main" machine. My main machine runs Debian. (Use to run Gentoo, for 2 years, but I got sick of compiling all the time.) I have an old Sony laptop, a spare 12" G4 Apple iBook, and 3 "extra" computers. Those are the systems I play around with when I feel like trying various operating systems or Linux distro.

I agree with your sentiment completely. If a person only has 1 computer (or laptop), they should pick an operating system / distribution and stick with it.

If you're an OS or distro geek, do yourself a favor and buy a spare computer to mess with. I don't even recommend a second hard-drive for your main machine because you still have to take your main system offline. It's very handy to have access to a working computer with a working Internet connection while messing with other operating systems on a different computer.

The upgrade went fine for me. I didn't have any problems with system crashes or even individual programs crashing. I had a system that wasn't obviously altered other than having newer versions of many programs.

One thing that could be seen as either good or bad (depending on your perspective) was the fact that it really did leave my system much the way it had been. I had actually gummed things up quite a bit by changing so many settings and messing with so many different software packages that doing a clean install (of any distro) and working from there would take less time than to remove various irritations by changing every little thing back by hand. Before changing anything though, I decided to try out the new distro and see how well it updated itself.

I like the fact that configuration changes were minimal. It's a breath of fresh air compared to installing IE (or one of its updates) and having to go through and get rid of every little reference to Outlook Express every time. (IE isn't the only example of software installations/updates doing this. It was just the first thing I thought of.) If I really want to, a clean install of Linux is so easy that I don't dread it. Upgrades/updates shouldn't act as though you never knew what you were doing before the upgrade/update.

I had same problem on my notebook... so now I'm gonna do clean installation i have already backuped my data.

Until the partitioner in the liveCD can handle installing GRUB on a partition rather than the MBR (and sanely keep my Windows partitions separate), I have to stick to the alternate system.

No, I haven't checked recently.

I think they switched to the new installer so they could combine 'try' and 'install' into a single package to remove the minor (unnecessary?) inconvenience of shutting down, switching CDs and booting a system again just to get what you were looking at the first time.

That, and some people are scared of textmode.

//Until the partitioner in the liveCD can handle installing GRUB on a partition rather than the MBR (and sanely keep my Windows partitions separate), I have to stick to the alternate system.//

I tried to install Kubuntu. The disk partioner crashed. I ran it from the command line and I saw that it crashed because apparently the install CD does not have a driver for ntfs partitions. So qtparted gave up, and exited as soon as it saw the existing Windows partitions.

Running qtparted is a vital step in the install process for dual boot. So you can't use this CD for setting up a dual boot.

That makes the Kubuntu 6.10 install CD so much useless plastic.

"I tried to install Kubuntu. The disk partioner crashed. I ran it from the command line and I saw that it crashed because apparently the install CD does not have a driver for ntfs partitions. So qtparted gave up, and exited as soon as it saw the existing Windows partitions.

Running qtparted is a vital step in the install process for dual boot. So you can't use this CD for setting up a dual boot."

I'm not exactly sure why this post got modded down, but anyway ... I have found a workaround.

I use a previous version of Xubuntu to run qtparted, and I simply deleted the partion that I intended to use for the new version of Kubuntu.

That way, when I started the Kubuntu live CD, and I went to install, it gave me an option to install to the unused spca on the drive, and it therefore bypassed qtparted in the installer.

I am running Kubuntu 6.10 now, and I still have Windows XP and PCLinuxOS istalled on the same hard disk.

No you're not alone, i hate livecd's other than knoppix aswell.The alternate install is much cleaner and faster.

This kind of problems is what separates a commercial quality dist from a free one.

This statement is wrong in many levels.

Commercial is not the opposite of 'free'. Software can be free and commercial (MySQL for example), as well as proprietary and non-commercial (a lot free as in beer software for Windows, for example).

Ubuntu is a commercial distribution, backed by a company called Canonical. Linspire is also one, the company is called Linspire. So any difference in quality you see is not because one is commercial and the other one is not. (Debian is a non-commercial distribution and it provides a much higher quality system than both Ubuntu and Linspire.)

A normal Ubuntu release has the goal of shipping the latest and greatest in the FOSS world. The latest kernel, the latest Xorg, the latest GNOME (or KDE), etc. This is exactly one of the reasons the distribution is so popular; there are a lot of people that like to have the latest, even if tinkering to get some bugs worked around is necessary.

Linspire isn't very good at this. However, they provide a release that is supported for a longer period of time. The development of a new version also takes a longer time, as well as the testing required to get that new version released.

So you're probably thinking that if you don't care that much about having the latest version of KDE, then Linspire is the distro for you and Ubuntu is useless. Well, that's not true either. Ubuntu has an "LTS" version, which is supported for a longer period of time and receives a lot more testing before release than a release such as Edgy. It also takes longer to develop. (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was released 8 months after the previous version, compared to 4 months for Ubuntu 6.10).

In short, if you think what Linspire provides is what you want, then you shouldn't be comparing it to this Ubuntu release in the first place. And don't forget your lesson: if you decide to check out the latest FOSS in 6 months, test Ubuntu 7.04 from the CD before killing your LTS installation. Or setup a partition just for testing new OS releases (being this site is called OSNews, I bet a lot of people here do that).

I think not including beagle by default was a wise decision. It's a resource-hog and buggy. I had it on Dapper and finally uninstalled it. It has promise but is not there yet. I'm using Tracker instead and it works like a charm, uses few resources and is very fast. Doesn't index Evolution mail but I use TBird which Beagle doesn't index anyway.

I'd use Tracker too, except it doesn't index any of the things I actually care about: mail, conversations and web. So it doesn't matter that it uses less resources, at least to me anyway.

By the way, Beagle's had some substantial memory usage improvements lately; see http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2006-October/msg00...

And finally, Beagle has thunderbird support (mail, news, RSS feeds, and addressbook).

Last I checked Beagle still didn't index TBird so it's good to know that it does now, and about the memory enhancements (though it sounds like they have yet to make it into an actual release and I'm no keen on running a trunk version). Thanks. I might give it another try then.

I had also run into another bug where after indexing so many documents (can't remember the exact number anymore) Beagle would stop working. It had reached that limit on my system and simply wouldn't index documents anymore. But maybe that's fixed too.

3D-promises are for Feisty Fawn. I suppose they are going to help GNOME and KDE to get their composite act together. (Kubuntu for example is the perfect developer platform for KDE4 since all packages are their with QT4.2 and KDE-libs4 ).

What 3D card do you have?

waiting one day to download...my god, what a man ;-)

True, servers are busy right now. But , if he looks a little, there are easy workaround this problem:

This poor reviewer could have downloaded from a torrent an alternate CD as explained on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdgyUpgrades

he would have had a -mostly- quiet download and later quiet install afterwards using the plain command:
#gksu "sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade"

But if you hit your head on the wall before, you are sure it will hurt.

Cheers