For a couple of weeks I had been walking around with the idea of doing a complete re-install of Windows XP (I'd rather delete it completely, but need it for the (&@#$#$) network my employer uses) and Ubuntu on my laptop. With new partitions, hard-drive sweep, etc. etc.

I have had great experiences with Gutsy - everything worked with the least effort and it looks and feels great. The thought of a Gutsy based release with long term support appealed to me so yesterday I went and took my idea to realisation, after trying the live-cd.

With the risk of sounding whiny. It didn't take me long to switch back to Gutsy! What a disappointment. I don't want to say 'what a piece of cr*p' just yet, but it's close, real close. Although I don't like to criticise the effort of an enthusiastic group of people who give away great operating systems for free, here is some of the problems I encountered:


- Right out of nowhere, the system hangs. It happened twice, for no apparent reason. "Orphaned inode", right... This has NEVER happened before, not even while I did the craziest thing on Dapper, back in the day. It's good that I used the journaling filesystem on my partitions.
- I had to try 4 (!!) times to get the nVidia and the broadcom drivers working. After I click 'enable', the system hangs - again. I reboot and, to my surprise, the drivers have not been installed.
- Finally I succeeded to install the proprietary drivers. But wireless internet did not work, whatever I tried. On Gutsy, it was click, type and go. After I entered the SSID and WPA, the network-manager just disappears. Restarting does not bring it back to life. A Ctrl-Alt-Backspace does, only to encounter the same problem again. And again.
- Synaptic hangs. No updates or custom packages to install.
- GRUB was f*cked right after I tested Win XP (which worked) and rebooted into Ubuntu, doing nothing after an 'error 15'. Using the live-cd to re-install GRUB was no success, the errors kept on coming. I don't know if this is Windows or Ubuntu related, but annoying nonetheless (it renders a whole system unusable).


This last error made me switch back to Gutsy (after a lot of swearing). It's running flawlessly on my laptop now. Now, I wonder if the aim of releasing a new version of Ubuntu every 6 months might just be a bit too quick - not enough time for a proper test-run?? I seriously hope that after some work Hardy will prove to be an improvement to Gutsy, even. But until then I'm staying clear of it!


Perhaps the aces were right - "Never upgrade if everything works now."


Let's share the opinions and experiences.

Greets,
Harm.