I upgraded my fiancée’s laptop a couple of days ago from Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). At first, update-manager didn’t offer the upgrade at all, and I had to delete the .update-manager -folder for it to work. Apparently this might be intentional, since quite a few people have had trouble with the upgrade. Anyway, I decided to bite the bullet and try it anyway. Soon after starting the upgrade process, I got an error message about some repositories. Only after disabling some of the repos in the ‘package sources’ list did it continue smoothly. The rest of the update went just fine, but I do have some gripes about it. For starters, the download looked like it would take too long to wait around, so I went outside, thinking the install would be ready by the time I was back.

Not so fast: when I came back, I found the update was waiting for my permission to restart ssh. Argh. Never mind, but this was not all: As I mentioned in a previous post, progress bars can be useless and annoying, if they give false information. When the update resumed, it happily told me there was “1 day, 3 hours and 4 minutes” left. In reality the rest of the upgrade took about 2 hours, but at no point did the progress bar estimate reflect reality except at the last minute or two. What’s the point? Estimates like this only serve to build mistrust in Ubuntu/Linux and computers in general. Even the progress bar without the estimate would be better.

Apart from the aforementioned silliness though, Ubuntu 7.04 is a very fine OS for everyday desktop use!