Precise

It has become a habit that I blog about the Ubuntu upgrade of my desktop, but this year I haven't found the time to do it on a timely manner.
Precise got announced as one of Canonicals best finished products ever, which did me upgrade some days before the official release. How did the upgrade go ? Not so good.

Basically, it bugs the hell out of me that Canonical still cannot refrain itself from messing with the end user settings. This upgrade wasn't any different. Disabling features like Ctrl-Backspace-Delete, the URL paste in Firefox with the middle-mouse button are some of the know stuff.

Some of the nasty upgrade bits :

• I forgot to pin nvidia-173, so it got removed and as it isn't part of Precise's multiverse (nvidia-current creates high kernel load); my X-config was foobarred. I just gave up and switched to Nouveau.
• Contrary to a lot of people, I do not find Unity and Dash to become more and more user-friendly with every release; they are working more and more on my nerves. I've tried to install MATE, but there's something broken with the nouveau config, it seems.
• the upgrade died on my netbook, due to a foobarred /var/lib/dpkg/status
• the upgrade foobarred my bcm4314 wireless card config on my netbook.
• the root filesystem gets marked dirty as some processes don't get stopped at shutdown, resulting in a 10-15 second penalty at the next boot.

In the end, I got everything rather quickly in a working state, but I find upgrading and fixing desktop software even more boring than watching the 3456332th episode of Neighbors, just to mention something...
The whole experience has convinced me that I'm not fitting in Canonicals 6 month upgrade process anymore, so I'll probably switch to the LTS release cycle, or to a Debian stable or CentOS based desktop in the future.