Hardy upgrade questions

Lately I've been seen a lot of hype for this new version of Ubuntu and im kind of curious about it. Ive just gotten my new laptop to work ok with all of its components(was having problems with wireless card). Lately I've heard good things and bad this about hardy. My questions are:

• What are the big differences between hardy and gusty?
• Is there any GUI differences?
• Does it have better performance?
• Is there better support for drivers?
• Will most of the programs that work on gusty will work on hardy?
• If i decide to upgrade should I do it now or wait till its more stable?

Please bear with me here I've never gone through an version update in Ubuntu.

Usually, everything is a little better with version upgrades. You would generally be well served with a version upgrade as newer drivers will often support hardware not previously supported, newer software may have more features, and so on.

However, if you have a troublesome piece of hardware like your wireless card, there are two things you could do. Since you have already gotten to work, you must know some details (chisept and such) about the hardware. A little googling may bring up other people's posts about the same hardware, and whether it works with hardy, or at least with 2.6.24 kernel (vs the 2.6.22 in gutsy).

However, the easier way to tell is to get a hardy desktop cd and boot from cd. If your hardware works, then you should be golden. Poke around and check if everything else is working, too.

Ill probably be testing to see if everything works fine. Yet is their really any BIG difference that will make me want to switch, or is this an update that simply brings a fix to small details. Because backing up all my data and re-doing all the tweaks I've done won't be pretty.

BTW thanks for the quick response.

I think Hardy is far superior to Gutsy. I've had 32 bit and 64 bit installed 2 from Alpha 5 and 2 from Beta. I've had no problems, no crashes, no hiccups. Updates have been flawless. Compiz works great. Firefox 3 Beta 5 it's been no problem. Sound, no problen. I don't use wireless.They are all extremely fast and reliable.

Yes I've hear about a lot of good fixes made with this upgrade but could any1 give me some feed back about how hardy has managed the wireless driver problems because that is one of the major drawbacks from Ubuntu. For example my wireless card took me about 5 days and 3 reformats. I not thinking twice about doing the same with hardy since I've already got it running under Gusty. Ill personally check it out. But for the moment could any1 give some feed back about troublesome wireless cards in hardy.

All feed back would be greatly appreciated.