Based on your experience is it stable enough to upgrade to already? Previously some final betas were.
A few notes: - the "stability" I refer to is always minor errors - I remove lots of packages every time I install it, although I've experienced system error notifications even when I didn't uninstall anything
All in all, I'd say that there is a lack of polishing, at the low-level, more than lack of stability.
There is no excuse for having the installation fail, though, and it happened a number of times.
To reply the question directly, I've used betas a few times, and they worked as much as the final version for me. I wouldn't do it now though - in the past, for my usage, some types of changes were very significant; today, I get very little in upgrading.
I agree, Ubuntu seems to work nicely out of the box, but behaves more and more like Windows, a kind of gradual deterioration over time. I am always getting warnings about some problem from suspend. It doesn't (seem to) stop anything working so far, but the install is only a month or two old.
On the other hand I tried Manjaro - a user friendly version of Arch. That needed a few more tweaks to get everything working after the initial install, but I have had it on another laptop for far longer, and so far non of these niggley problems like in Ubuntu.
I wish I never upgraded to 13.10. Sometimes drag-maximizing my window can crash my entire system. And compiz leaks memory like a sieve, sometimes I will wake up to find compiz using ~5.5gb of memory and the system will be unusable. Gotta restart!
When I first upgraded, I thought "oh, it's always like this at the start, they'll fix it." And here we are at the next version and it still hasn't been fixed.
Probably jumping ship (to another Linux distro) once my next work deadline passes.
Regardless, I do not have enough loyalty to Ubuntu to do this kind of work. There are a number of open source projects that I am involved with, and if I spend time on this (likely to be fruitless) endeavor, I end up with less time to spend on projects I care about.
My post is purely to vent, and to serve as a warning for those looking to try Ubuntu Desktop. My personal opinion is to try something else. I am.
Problems of that sort were understandable in 1995, when Linux and the few distributions available at the time were still relatively immature. They were even understandable in the very early 2000s, when hardware support sometimes wasn't great. But these days, there's really no excuse for a lack of quality like you're describing.
pulseaudio -k
There's a ppa for arm-gcc that I want to use (https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded) , but so far it's still on Ubuntu 13.04. How is it possible to try to make the ppa work on Ubuntu 14.04? What are the steps involved? Is there some way to find out how the ppa was made for Ubuntu 13.04 and recreate those steps on 14.04?