But to be honest, the progress of linux distros towards unusable GUIs has made leaps and bounds. I am finding it almost as painful as trying to use a windoze machine some times.
ubuntu wanted to upgrade - so it asked me 50 times in one window on top of another! I closed 49 of them and said yes only to be screwed over and broken.
Thanks to Jimi (one of our tech guys) for just sorting it for me. All done remotely, and not even during work hours.
It is not that I couldn't do it, really, just I know a man that can sort it way faster than I. Jimi is the man. Well done.
One of the magic incantations was :-
sudo apt-get remove unity
Another was:-
sudo apt-get install tcsh
How he managed to persuade it to actually finish the upgrade cleanly enough to do either, he will have to let me know some time...
kill -9 -1
ReplyDeleteUbuntu upgrades are nightmares. I've gone through Debian dist upgrades since potato in 2001, an almost every one of them was painless. I do have Ubuntu installed on two systems. Every dist upgrade broke huge amounts of stuff. (I still have to manually fix my grub config every time I upgrade my Eeeee to a new kernel). And then they laugh at Debian for being slow with new version. It's because of the months of stabilisation before they release, silly...
ReplyDeleteSo, in short: don't blame Linux, don't blame Ubuntu's Debian foundations. Blame Canonical.
I have to say that this was the first version of Ubuntu I've ever upgraded to that didn't completely break something fundamental. Ok, I did have to force grub onto the right disk (I remembered this time) but other than that it did "just work". Upgrading the VM server instances I had was even easier.
ReplyDeleteOh, and I'm starting to like Unity but still not a great fan.
Hmmm I use xubuntu on my laptop and the upgrade process from 10.04 to 12.04 was pretty painless.
ReplyDeleteI've run Ubuntu for the last couple of years on desktop/laptop machines, but unity is just such a clunky resource hog - I'm switching to fedora Core 16 (LXDE spin) - its a breath of fresh air for responsivness.
ReplyDelete