I rarely upgrade my operating systems. Installing from scratch and migrating my files usually gives a more predictable result. Mac OS X is usually fine to upgrade.
So, I decided to try to upgrade my x64 workstation running Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04, and to do it the normal user-way.
In conclusion everything went just fine. The upgrade took roughly 3h on a 3GHz Dual Core Athlon x64 with an old-style SATA drive (tempting to get an SSD drive), with a 10Mbit internet connection.
Grub Question
I got a scary question from Grub: do you want to keep your grub configuration, use the maintainers version, or [plenty of other options]? I dont remember editing my Grub configuration. I have a Windows 7 system as well that I want to be able to boot. Anyway, I choose to install the new version and pray. It went all fine. But, for a user upgrade, that question did not feel so comfortable.
Extra PPA repositories
I had installed software from non-standard repositories (latest version of Shotwell and Handbrake). Those programs simply did not exist when I had upgraded. I did not get any warnings or questions, they just disappeared.
Skype and DropBox did work after the upgrade though. DropBox works, but the DropBox icon (some kind of nautilus-plugin) is lost in Unity. Starting the Dropbox application (which exists) does not do anything. So, I really dont know if I can reconfigure or manage dropbox from Unity, or if I can monitor my transfers.
Unity
Well, it will take time to get used to Unity. I did not love Gnome, and I like the Unity vision and idea better. So, I have decided to live with it and try to enjoy it. All my Compiz configurations were gone, perhaps it is possible to restore them. What currently disturbs me the most with Unity is that the Icons are so large, and that I have to click “see 31 more results” when there would be room for all of them at once.
Also, the menu bar is empty (cant see File, Edit, etc) until I move the mouse there. Well, it looks clean, but it can hardly help productivity.
I have not noticed any performance problems with video etc.
Citrix / LibMotif
A nice thing is is that Natty comes with Libmotif4, not Libmotif3, which makes Citrix ICA client work out of the box without stupid symlinks.
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