Upgrade from Ubuntu 10 without losing desktop environment

[karlpcrowley]

Hi everyone, I've tried searching this but got nowhere.
Is it possible to upgrade past Ubuntu 10.10 without losing the desktop environment?

I'm not a fan of Unity and prefer Gnome 2 over Gnome 3

ATM I'm on 10.04LTS and would like to stay up to date without re-configuring my layouts

Any help or links would be greatly appreciated, thanks

[PhantomTurtle]

You can install Gnome Classic(it is installed when you install gnome-shell). The only thing is that you might not be able to move over all your settings.

[grahammechanical]

12.04 is a big break from how things worked in 10.04.

My advice is to create another partition and install 12.04 in that. Then alter it to see if it will alter to the way you want it to be. Do this before upgrading 10.04 to 12.04. Once you upgrade you cannot go back and you do not want to risk messing up your working system.

Remember, things change and we do get used to what is new and different. I have been using 12.04 development branch since November and when I switch to 11.10 it feels like I am using an old OS. 11.10 is closer to 12.04 than 10.10 is but we do get used to new things.

Regards.