What's an even bigger joy with the six month release cycle, is that you always have a lot of new and better functionality to long for, but without being as disruptive as e.g. a Windows update tends to be. Compared to the hassle it was every time I had to upgrade to a newer Windows version, upgrading to another Ubuntu release is as easy as eating cake. That doesn't you don't need to make back-ups before you start to upgrade, but you won't need to spend a lot of time trying to find applications that are compatible with your new OS and at the same time can handle your old files.
There are, however, always small things that have to be done once you've upgraded to a new release of Ubuntu. Most of them are simple reconfigurations. Here's a list of things I had to do after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10:
- For one reason or another, the GLText screensaver configuration has been set back to a default text showing the name of my computer and the version number of the kernel in every single release. As a consequence, I'm getting good at setting its configuration file /usr/share/applications/screensavers/gltext.desktop back to include the line Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/gltext -root -no-wander -no-spin -program "<my-custom-script.sh>"
- Adding all accounts to Gwibber again. I was of course expecting having to reauthenticate, but erasing all information about all accounts just seems very clumsy. Besides from that, the new version of Gwibber seems to be a big improvement.
- I had to change the default proportional font in Thunderbird back to serif. For one reason or another, it had fallen back to sanserif.
