I'm antsy but scared...talk me out of Dapper

[s|k]

So I installed Breezy a few weeks ago and got it *perfect.* Just perfect. I love it. I wasn't planning on switching OS's, but I was so impressed by Ubuntu, I hardly boot into Windows anymore.

But now I have the itch to upgrade. :(

It has taken me a couple of weeks to get my CD's ripped (not even half way done). It took a while to get sound to work, had to install ALSA from source. Lot's of stuff. I'm scared I'll lose everything if I upgrade. I've been doing my graduate study research with ubuntu, and if I lose that my life is over (I have backed it up, so actually not over, just pained). I figure I could always just switch back to Windows if it goes badly and I kill everything. What do you all think?

My hardware is: Intel HDA Sound, ASEUS motherboard, Intel P4 3ghz HT chip, nVida 7800 GTX graphics, 3GB of RAM. I'm using my 80GB HD for ubuntu, and my 200GB for Windows (only because it was installed first before I even knew of Ubuntu).

[briancurtin]

if you are doing graduate research on ubuntu, stay where you are at and finish it. no reason to try and redo it, then mess it up and have to take a few days setting it up again and hope your backups work.

[bergersau]

It ain't broke - dont try to fix it!

I'd let other users work the bugs out of the upgrade if you're worried about breaking your system - leave it it till a month or so after the official release and most of the issues will have been resolved and/or documented in the forums.

For now just stay up to date with breezy.

[briancurtin]

dont even worry about upgrading, not even a month after the official release. just do the work until its done and then worry about upgrading. id consider graduate research to be mission critical and i dont see a reason to do a major upgrade to the system in the middle of research.

if you really want to do it, make backups and test the backups thoroughly before upgrading.

[kairu0]

I completely understand that itching urge to upgrade. The thing is, you have a working setup for your critical data and you really should not mess it up. If you are that anxious to try Dapper, install it on a secondary machine or in a virtual machine in your current installation.

[PapaWiskas]

I have been wanting to upgrade since late January....but I havent because I have worked really hard to get my laptop working great in Xubuntu, Ubuntu and Kubuntu. To get my "upgrade" fix, I have been downloading Live CDs of other Distros, I know it sounds lame, but it makes me feel like I am doing some tinkering, and I am not hurting my system. I want Dapper really bad, but I am just going to wait until 2 or 3 months after the release, just because I am scared of messing up my "running just fine Breezy"

[mattisking]

I upgraded the day the repo opened... but I have a secondary PC to do that kind of crazy crap on. It was a fun ride (still is). Like everyone else says, though, I'd wait. The dist-upgrade is a painful process, particularly when you've made a lot of custom changes. I can almost guarantee you that things will break with the upgrade that would work fine from a new install.

[BoyOfDestiny]

There is always QEMU, or a chroot (actually I'm curious about trying that, besides the one I have for dapper 32...) Might be interesting to try gentoo that way without having to emulate anything...

[MetalMusicAddict]

Do it! Do it! Do it! http://ubuntuforums.org/images/lite/icons/icon13.gif

[K.Mandla]

I was equally hesitant just because I got Breezy to work like I wanted. But I started playing around with Flight 3, then 4, now 5. ...

I haven't had any problems with stability or anything. I'm really impressed. Any problems or errors I experienced were 99 percent my fault and 1 percent my fault.

I know I'm not supposed to use Dapper on a production machine because there is still the potential for catastrophic error, but to be honest ... Dapper's more solid than Windows was for me.

No wait, that should go without saying. ... :mrgreen:

[AlphaMack]

Partition...partition...partition... :)

[darrenrxm]

3 Gigs of ram? Why do you need so much?

[s|k]

I may play around with that live CD idea. Thanks for the advice everyone! :)

[OffHand]

Dapper isn't finished yet. Expect problems.
Stick with Breezy if you need your compu for production.

[mstlyevil]

Just a warning to all who are tempted to upgrade to Dapper. Do not upgrade to Dapper as your main operating system if you depend on your PC to be stable. It is true that Dapper overall is stable, but any update at any time can break it. Also there are some programs you might depend on that do not play well with it yet.

If you have a spare drive or partition or you do not have nothing important to lose, then go for it and have fun. Otherwise, just be paitient and wait for the official release.

[ssam]

i say try it on a partition. (or try the live cd)

if you find any bugs now and report them then they may be fixed by the final release. that way installing dapper final will be easier for you and people with similar set ups.

its far more difficult for bugs to be fixed after a release.

from looking through the bug tracker on launch pad it looks like its fairly easy for the developers to fix things like acpi blacklisting, volume/brightness keys hardware detection etc if they are given a good bug reports during the development cycle.

if you want dapper to work out of the 'box' on your setup then now is the time to test it.

note: it is a development release with bugs, dont install it on a machine that you need to work.