They are releasing with a beta version of an Nvidia driver that they switched to only this week. I've been running the 10.10 beta since it was announced, and this beta driver black-screens here unfortunately. I have to run an older driver via a manual install from Nvidia for things to work; the Ubuntu team do not provide an option for this.
Even if this problem doesn't affect you, a lot of folk are having 100% cpu issues for some display operations. I can hit this by simply scrolling in a terminal window.
Some machines will also fail to suspend. A hack has been made to grub to help with this, but it might also be necessary to add custom parameters to the grub kernel lines. I'm having to use "acpi_sleep=nonvs" so that suspend works.
In addition, there is a bug that can cause pulseaudio to hit 100% (on one processor, these days) when unpluggging some USB audio devices. Yup, got that one too.
This is the worst release I've experienced on Ubuntu. I've used it since 5.10. This same machine worked flawlessly on 10.04.
I get the impression that they were going to release on 10/10/10 regardless of issues. It would take balls not to release it at this point, but that would be the appropriate thing to do. I don't believe it's ready. We'll see.
On a side note, is there a good summary of new features out there that isn't terribly outdated?
However, on my computers, on the hardware side, I always expected the improvements of the new version. Then I've discovered that simple upgrades can even break the software side of the distro (the interaction between their own parts), as it seems that the upgrades are not enough tested compared to the clean installs. I've found that it's much more probable to have everything working correctly if I just keep the home partition but install the new release from the scratch. But this is also more work than it's convenient, for doing every six months.
Additionally, I've found that security updates are still behaving better when run from the console than from the GUI. It shouldn't be so. The GUI updates should not be so annoying and attention consuming but really do things in the background.
1. Upgrade to Qt4 broke Spotify Linux. This is a Spotify, not Ubuntu issue, but just FYI.
2. Compiz Wallpaper is broken. That is, if you had Compiz to show different wallpaper for each workspace, it now just has a blank screen.
Otherwise working OK, nice new fonts and icons, but not amazing. If in doubt probably worth waiting a while for the fixes.
Eventually i'll upgrade at some point, but no rush.
So far I've had no problems, but also haven't noticed many improvements.
The only problem I had was TouchFreeze[1] got uninstalled and removed from the repository :/
I had to look around but eventually I downloaded the source from launchpad[2] and installed it[3]
[1] App to freeze touchpad while typing
[2] bzr branch lp:ubuntu/touchfreeze
[3] qmake && make && cp touchfreeze ~/bin/
One the whole I don't think I'd do it again; there's been at least two showstopping bugs. To be fair, one of those (ATI driver incompatibility with new X server version, from what I understand) probably won't be fixed in the final release either.
Due to ATI's poor Linux support on their newer video cards, even upgrading my kernel is often a pain. Furthermore, without significant new features, I'm perfectly happy to keep my box chugging along with 10.04 LTS.
So far the best feature I like is the new fonts. It really makes a difference in the overall user experience.
So I have a dated vlc, a dated Amarok, etc.
I want to update, but I need to do a solid disk image backup of my laptop first in case shit happens.
I've been running 9.x or 10.x or so on my desktop, with Trinity KDE3, and have been pretty happy with it; hibernation started working after a somewhat recent kernel update. :)
I really like Amarok 1.4. Don't like 2.x. (Don't like KDE 4, either, so I'm glad Trinity is around, despite its quirks).
Then it was -very- prone to crashing. I just finally fixed it by disabling one of the screens today. At least, I think it is. It's extremely hard to track down because it happens almost randomly. But it definitely started when I upgraded.
The two last reasons are so much easier and faster to do by hand and it was such a breeze to do in Slackware compared to when I ran into it in Ubuntu.
The second thing that I like a lot more with Slackware is the config style; to go into a file and to edit it directly instead of doing it GUI-style. I guess you could configure it in the files directly in Ubuntu too, but Slackware is basically built around editing these files for configuration and so I've find that they're a lot easier to edit; great documentation and easy to find.
Ubunut is a great way to easily get a working linux up and running without much configuration needed, but if you have the time and energy to sit down and tinker with it a bit like I had then Slackware is pretty easy and straightforward too.
Lastly I think that if you run Ubuntu, you will learn exactly that: Ubuntu. But if you run Slackware you will learn more linux with only a few Slackware specific parts like the startup scripts and the package tools - I can't honestly think of anything else which is unique to Slackware (the startup scripts are actually BSD style but meh). Which is a good thing if you want to learn linux like me.
I guess I'm just old...
Ubuntu however is easier and works fine for me.
I'm also wary of Shuttleworth's commercializing of Ubuntu. I have no problem with a benevolent dictator, but Shuttleworth aim isn't benevolent.
Or start the Ubuntu Update Manager (System -> Admin -> Update Manager), which will display an option to dist-upgrade when one is available.
You have to use some other commands to get an actual Ubuntu version upgrade (I don't know them, but you seem to have the GUI version down.)
After a little digging, the command line to upgrade to the newest Ubuntu version is:
%> sudo apt-get update
%> sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
%> sudo do-release-upgrade
11.04 should have fewer bugs and major changes, I would THINK.