Vista fiasco continues with retreat to XP | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com
Fall back! Fall back!
Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “Extended Availability of Windows XP Home for ULCPCs†is more evidence that the Windows Vista fiasco is still growing.Microsoft is scrambling to stay relevant in a world where they are no longer the only game in town. Can’t let Linux become the default OS for low-cost systems, can we?
I’m more happy than ever that I ordered my new Lenovo X61 with XP instead of Vista. And I’m equally glad that I got the machine also running with Ubuntu. Which I need to upgrade, by the way – does anybody know how difficult that is going to be?
I’ve had a desktop with Ubuntu since 6.06. I’ve upgraded to:
6.10, 7.04, and 7.10. The first two upgrades went swimmingly.
The third? Not so much. And by “not so much” I mean horrifyingly wrong. It managed to be unable to download a good chunk (maybe half) of the components, yet was still stupid enough to uninstall the 7.04 versions of them. I ended up being forced to reinstall via a disk. Fortunately, my /home was a different partition so I lost nothing, other than installed programs.
I think it was because I used the built-in upgrade that tried downloading from their servers, which were swamped at the time. That’s the last time I ever upgrade in the first few days after a release.
But those first two were just a few mouse clicks and a lot of waiting.
Bill, I’ve been using Mandriva for 3 years now, and the only only Linux disro with a better reputation for ease of installation is Ubuntu. “It just works.”
The caveat that I’ve always heard for any Linux flavor, though, is that installs go much more smoothly than upgrades. And in particular, if you plan to upgrade from anything older than the previous release, you’re liable to find problems.
Three words of advice then; backup, backup, backup (and I really recommend a fresh install, regardless. It’s just not that hard.)
Ubuntu actually won’t let you upgrade to a distribution that isn’t the next in line, as far as I am aware. To get to 7.04, I have to first upgrade to 6.10 (from 6.06), then it installed 7.04. Which is why I’m not so sore about the 7.04-7.10 upgrade going badly. It handled two upgrades in one day without a flop.
I’ll be going from 7.10 to the 8.x version. I don’t want to mess too much with my current setup, though. It took way too much work and time to get it running to my satisfaction.
No, it didn’t “just work.” But it did – eventually – work for most things.
The next version of Ubuntu, 8.04, is slated for April, a.k.a “real soon now”. They release just after Gnome, so end of April at the latest.
I’ve been running Ubuntu 7.10 for a few months now and I like it. Except for a few hiccups. When 8.04 comes out I’ll switch to Kbuntu because I just can’t stand Gnome. I tried living with it a few years ago and hated it. Gave it another chance recently and hate it even more.
YMMV.
I dont’ understand the various flavors. Is Kubuntu upgraded at the same time Ubuntu is? Can you upgrade a 7.10 Ubuntu install to an 8.04 Kubuntu install, if there is such a thing?
I started with Ubuntu 7.04, I think, and switching to 7.10 broke my wireless and EVDO – which it took quite a while to fix – and EVDO is still a bit flaky.
I think 7.04 wasn’t GNOME, by the way, and whatever it was, I liked it better than 7.10. So should I look at Kubuntu?
Regular Ubuntu uses Gnome, Kubuntu uses KDE. I don’t think you can upgrade from one to another, but you can install KDE or Gnome on the other; I have both on my plain Ubuntu 7.10. If you installed regular Ubuntu, you have Gnome. But installing KDE isn’t too hard. Just open up Synaptic and type “KDE” into the search, then find the meta-package (“KDE-Desktop” or something) that selects the entire suite. Then you can pick and choose.
The difference you may have noticed in 7.10: 7.10 added a bunch of graphical effects (called Compiz) and there are a lot of problems with it. 7.10 had a lot of people complaining at the boards. Various incompatibilities and the like. I’ve actually heard from a few people that the “*.10” releases tend to be more problematic. Why this is… I’m not sure.
Kubuntu should be updated at the same time, but the difference between KDE and Gnome is mostly look-and-feel, with a few differences in the way they do things. I prefer Gnome for a few reasons, but it’s not that far ahead of KDE. (And if the Gnome people keep trying to make it “easy” by hiding preferences/options from users… my preference will change. Making me do obscure things to change my options is not making it “easy”…)