upgrading to Jaunty?

[oxf]

I suspect this is one of those questions there is no definitive answer to, a bit like which distro should I use? But I've been running Hardy for maybe 9 months now and wondering if I should go ahead and upgrade. I've held off resolving a couple of minor issues (such as the battery power indicator not working on my laptop and occasional reluctance to connect to my Wifi) knowing that when I do these may be resolved or easier to resolve.

Essentially my question or what I'm wondering is this. I read around a lot of the comments about 9.04 and find people are mostly satisfied with it. Some seem to say it's significantly improved but then a few seem to report bugs. In short I'm confused! I get the impression one area of concern is with ATI video cards? maybe this has been fixed by now?

Anyway I have an ATI in my laptop and Nvidea in my desktop. By my reasoning if I have to put the work into fixing any issue in Hardy I might as well do it in Jaunty. Any thoughts on the above and more?

[techieMoe]

Unless you're having trouble with 8.04 (which was the last Long Term Support release if I'm not mistaken) personally I would recommend you hold off until the next LTS. I'm using 9.04 and I've had no issues with the 32-bit version, but ran into problems with the 64-bit. There are some speed improvements and some newer themes in 9 that could be fun, but if everything works for you now I see no compelling reason for you to upgrade.

Of course, it's entirely up to you. You can always try out the latest version using the LiveCD option and see if the improvements are worth it.

[egan]

Well, in some ways the latest release is great, and others, not so great.

I have ATI Mobility Radeon, with each release it is working better. In Hardy, I had to do some manual stuff to get compiz working, and never got my Broadcom wireless card. In Intrepid, my card was detected and I was able to choose to switch to fglrx driver, but there were some glitches, and the same was true for my wireless card. In jaunty, however, both my wireless card and my graphics card worked out of the box, and I don't have any of the glitches I used to.

On the bad side, how ever are the moves towards"user-friendliness" that are slightly misguided:
1. Starting in Intrepid, they switched from xorg.conf to hal fdi system. This is all well and good until the dynamic, automatic configuration doesn't work, and you have to hack obscure xml files. This isn't really a problem in Ubuntu, but it is in Xubuntu since their settings are less exposed.
2. In Jaunty they removed the Shut Down and Log Out buttons from the System menu. It turns out, that once you remove the Switch User applet, they come back, but it is still confusing.
3. In Jaunty they disabled Control Alt Backspace by default.
4. I do get occasional freezes... like the ones I would get on Mac OS 7. This was not the case with Hardy or Intrepid.

[impNERD]

8.04 is by far my favorite Ubuntu. 8.10 was a bit bloated IMO and 9.04 has its negatives. I am in the ATI boat. I knew about it before upgrading but decided to go ahead with it anyway. I am not much into games and I couldn't care less about compiz so it doesn't really affect me.

9.04 is noticably faster, however. It also comes with all the updated software (of course).

So here is my advice: If you like 3d stuff (for games or compiz) don't upgrade. If you know how to install updated software without headaches, don't upgrade. If you don't care about your systems startup time, don't upgrade.

[twoHats]

Couldn't agree more with the majority here. 8.04.x is the one i use on my main workstation and my server. I have 9.04 on my play around workstation, and have not been tempted to adopt it everywhere. I have had newworking hastles, which i have never had with 8.04.

I also tried 8.10 and found it wanting... so ... I agree.

[oxf]

Thanks for your comments!

Well I dont use 3D/games much so that shouldent be an issue. There are a few minor issues under Hardy I've not resolved (mainly not bothered since anticipating upgrade) e.g:

Battery power meter.
Occasional reluctance or slow to connect to WiFi
Display drivers (Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE) I've been told installing the generic drivers may take care of this. I guess this is my main area of concern. (Nvidea in my Acer desktop)

Is the boot up time really faster on Jaunty? I'd like to take care of the above issues and reason it might be easier if not already resolved under 9.04. (never tried Hardy BTW) I was just wondering about any other negative aspects to 9.04

Mike

[techieMoe]

Is the boot up time really faster on Jaunty?

It was for me, significantly so.

[jmadero]

well I'll put in my two cents. I personally like Intrepid a lot more than Jaunty. I saw huge improvements in my wireless functionality (it was the first time I left ndiswrapper and moved to the native broadcom drivers because in Hardy native drivers worked poorly for me). I have tried Jaunty several times, from Alpha 2 - 5 and then Beta, RC and then final release. I found bugs in all of them, it actually screwed up my home folder config stuff and I had to manually go through and fix a few things which was a pain (even after going back to intrepid the problems persisted so I had to go into my home partition and fix them). I am waiting for 9.04.1 to come out (I believe that's the naming convention they use for second release) to try again. I loved the speed of Jaunty -- boot time is amazing, also their theme for general stuff like volume meter, internet connection, etc...is a nice sleek black which I liked.

Well that's it from me

Edit -- well I have to say one other thing. With 9.04 was the first time that I fundamentally disagreed with a move made by the Ubuntu group, they chose to use non stable intel drivers which are known to lock up (they locked up my girlfriends computer causing her to lose pages of outline right before finals). They have said why they chose to do this but I feel like having the option to use stable drivers would have been better than forcing non stable ones on everyone.

[twoHats]

I also experienced windoze style lockup with Kubuntu 9.04

Had to use the BRS (now we will find out who is old) which in 8 years of regular Linux use is very unusual. Not an improvement IMHO. The Ubuntu/Kubuntu team seem so intent on the April/October release date thing that they are willing to release a distro not ready for prime time - hope this isn't the case.

I have actually been looking around - used to use Mandriva - and before that Fedora Core - might go back to one of those 0r just good old Debian.

[undoIT]

I usually upgrade to the latest release every six months if there are no major issues with the Live CD. I've also done the distro update from 8.04 thru the current 9.04 with success on several machines that were not heavily tweaked.

On my main machine I do a full backup (always good to have an excuse to run a backup if you aren't doing this weekly / monthly) and then do a fresh install and restore all my data. In my experience, Ubuntu just keeps getting better with each release and most issues if there are any are easy to sort out or are fixed after a couple weeks with updates.