Upgrading to Oneriric Ocelot (Ubuntu 11.10)

Yesterday I decided to give in and upgrade to (the very strangely and unfortunately named) Oneriric Ocelot aka Ubuntu 11.10, from 10.10. Unlike my last upgrade (10.04 to 10.10), this wasn't nearly as pleasant, because other than changing a whole lot of things I had already gotten used to and therefore placing a learning curve where I didn't want one, it took 6 hours instead of the 2 it took the last time!

That alone makes me want to write this to warn people. What I thought would've been ok to do during a lunchtime break took up the rest of my workday, relegating me to my laptop. Even that wasn't very productive since the downloads hogged bandwidth too.

At any rate, here's my experience. This is the first window, what's missing from it?

An estimate to how long it should take, that's what. 'Can take several hours' can mean anywhere between 2 hours (acceptable) to 6.5 hours (totally ruins your day unacceptable), so really, that deserves more information. And I would think my situation, which is ugprading from the most previous version, should've been the quickest at least in theory. I imagine most people were in the same situation as me so I don't think they'd be happy either.

Here's what greets you once you click go.

That '3 hours 28 minutes remaining' changed to 5 hours at some point, but since you're not obviously going to sit in front of it watching that status bar for hours, you're liable to miss it. I only saw it when I occasionally went back to check on it.

And what's more, questions popup occasionally that stop the whole process until you act on it. This is a disaster for an upgrade process, because again you're very likely to miss it because you won't be there to click 'OK'. It happened more than once, here:

here..

After a few hours, it will stop again when it asks you questions about configuring Grub..

With several choices.

And btw, the esoteric choices should really have a 'recommended' in parenthesis or at least a short explanation what would happen. I had no inclination to do a side-by-side study because really, at that point I just wanted it to finish.

Maybe a 'you can change this later' option and instructions can help. As it is it was just another question that pops out of nowhere to stop the process, making it even longer than usual because I wasn't in front of the computer to make a choice.

Sometime early evening (I started lunchtime) I got to this. I dunno when it came up because again I wasn't there to see it.

And finally.

And now, here it is!

This is what'll greet you first time you see it. My first reaction really, was to gasp at how nice the wallpaper was. But almost instantly I wanted to get rid of that side-opening icon thing (I don't even know what it's called) and go back to the traditional desktop with icons underneath or above my screen. I ventured to the 'Appearance' tab here to try and find how, but no go:

At least the Appearance settings allowed for this:

Wallpaper that changes throughout the day was a longtime pet frustration of mine on Ubuntu. I tried installing a bunch of apps to do that none of which really worked well at all. Finally it's built - in, so this is great.

Another big frustration was Nvidia support for my video card, which I had hoped this upgrade would address. Unfortunately, this still used the proprietary ones again.

Also discovered while tooling around the settings area, this allows default applications, and had Thunderbird, Evolution and Opera as choices. I wish it also had a 'none' because I don't use offline email and when I click an email address on the browser, I do not want it to open any app, I just want nothing to happen. I think this is same as 10.10.

Here is the login page, which looks a lot slicker than the last one. Version 10.10 however, had an option underneath that allowed you to use the traditional desktop similar to 10.04, which I preferred. Sadly this does not have that option, so I'm stuck with that side-sliding thing ala - Mac desktop which I do not like.

So to conclude, I regret upgrading because I was perfectly happy with 10.10 and should've stayed. The upgrade process took unexpectedly far too long and the questions that it asks during the process does nothing but make the process longer. The new desktop is also a new learning curve for me, making me have to learn new things when I didn't have to.

Having said that, I'm still learning how to get around this and I'm a very quick learner when it comes to using GUIs, so I might get around to liking it eventually, I dunno. I still have to find out what if any is there about this that is a really big improvement over the last version, but until then I have to conclude that if I were totally new to Ubuntu I'd probably enjoy the fancy bells and whistles. Otherwise if you're happy with 10.10, I think it's best you stay there.

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