Upgrade from 12.04LTS

[Liamdale]

New user: Presently I have 12.04 LTS ubuntu installed in dual boot with Windows XP. My current computer is a pentium 4 and I'm planing a new computor purchase this year. The new computor's OS will be entirely Linux. This dual boot approch is to learn Linux whilst having acces to my old data in Windows.

My question: Presently ubuntu has 12.04 LTS, 12.10, 13.10 and 14.04 LTS out there. Since 12.04 is a long term support version (2017 I believe), is it worth my while to upgrade to 12.10 or 13.10 ? I am hesitant to upgrade the 14.04 LTS since my computer is fairly old. The 12.04 LTS version I have works fine on my present system.

Opinions please

Liamdale

[grahammechanical]

First you should know that Ubuntu 12.10 is about to reach end of Life and Ubuntu 13.10 will reach end of life in July 2014.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

So, you have the option to stay on 12.04 until it reaches end of life and then decide what you want to do about that machine or upgrade to 14.04 and have the use of that machine for even longer. Of course it all depends on how well Ubuntu runs on that machine. You do not tell us the specification of it. The term "fairly old" can mean anything.

I am running Ubuntu 14.04 on a machine that I built back in 2007 with new components that were not the newest on the market. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.40 GHz with 1GB of Ram but most important I have a graphic card with 1GB of it own memory. A Nvidia GT220. Ubuntu 14.04 runs excellently. I think that the amount of graphic card memory is making an important contribution to my user experience.

I have seen improvements in the use of memory and CPU by Ubuntu in 14.04 compared to what I was seeing in 12.04. I am confident that this machine will be able to run Ubuntu 16.04 when it comes out. I say this because all the work done on Ubuntu for phones/tablets on reducing power consumption and giving the user an excellent user experience is going to be merged into the Ubuntu desktop code base.

Yesterday I was running a test using something called OpenGL (ES) 2.0 benchmark. I was comparing the present arrangement where Ubuntu uses Xserver with Ubuntu using Xmir (the future arrangement) and for the Xserver the score was 101 but for Xmir the score was 277. Xmir is giving me a much greater number of frames per second than Xserver does. This is a massive improvment to the Mir display driver to what it was 1 year ago. So, I am confident that the coming improvements to Ubuntu will benefit my use of this machine.

You can download ISO images and test out Ubuntu as well as some of the other flavours such as Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

Regards.

[Liamdale]

Thanks Grahammechanical for the input

Sorry for the delay in answering, absent.

My old computer is 2006 vintage with an Intel pentium 4 3.6hz, 3,1M of Ram with a very ordinary Asus (ATI teck) 1M video card (Orginal card was better but it died on me)

I will update to 14.04 and see what happens. One question, I read on one site that jumping from 12.04 directly to 14.04 can cause OS problems. It is better to do it in steps, 12.4 to 12.10, 12.10 to 13.10 and finally 13.10 to 14.04. Any comments on this approach.

As for other flavors of Ubuntu, I've been testing some. I've tested Mint cinnamon, KDE,Gnome3, XFCE. I like Mint and XFCE. Don't like Gnome3 and find KDE cute but it does seem to be overkill. Afterall the Desktop environnement is there generally to execute applications, give acces to the terminal and acces to mail and internet. The file management system seem to be the same in all of them.

Liamdale