should i upgrade from 8.04 to the latest version?

[nuclearj]

I was lucky enough to get a free computer from a friend that is more powerful than what I have currently. My question is, should I upgrade to the latest release. I am very comfortable with hardy and have wine with other stuff installed. Ok my real question is: is there anything that I am missing because I am not using the latest and greatest? Please discuss.

[northrup]

I actually just attempted an upgrade from 8.04 to 9.10. Something to keep in mind, though, is that to upgrade without performing a clean installation, you have to work your way up the Ubuntu releases (e.g. 8.04 > 8.04 LTS > 8.10 > 9.04 > 9.10).

I recommend that you at least upgrade to 8.04 LTS, and then upgrade to the next LTS release (since I think they can skip over all the releases in between. Don't quote me on that, though).

In my case, I had to perform a clean install, since the computer I was upgrading crashed during 9.04 installation. But my 8.04 installation was screwed up to begin with, so in my case I should have just done a clean install after backing up my files (which I did). But if you have a perfectly good installation, upgrading should be no problem. However, I'd wait for the LTS release, especially since 9.10 has a lot of audio-related bugs that should (hopefully) be corrected in 10.04.