I am currently upgrading the last machine in the portfolio to Ubuntu 10.04 from Ubuntu 9.04, that being the last version I liked. The only ways to do this upgrade is a complete reinstall of the root disk (probably the cleanest) or an upgrade to ubuntu 9.10 then to version 10.04. If the latter is done (as I do), copy ~/.mozilla somewhere first to stop intermediate firefox upgrades making a mess of things.
Also: expect all thunderbird filters to get lost. This is inconvenient if you use thunderbird as an IMAP client to a large server which keeps many years of ASF email lists and other mail to hand.
Recommendations
- Make a note of the filter settings
- Turn off the indexing if you have a big server full of data
- The junk mail data gets lost too, so keep an eye on the junk folder
- If you have >1 account, only one seems to be retained in the upgrade. Consider noting down all the details of all accounts
Other than that, the upgrades have gone fairly well. Sometimes during the install process it stops asking you if some config file you've never heard of should be overwritten, and you have to look at the changes in a file you've never seen or whose meaning you understand. This is not a good end-user experience. And the work desktop sound system stops working on hibernates, so it's a good thing alsa force-restart exists to fix that.
The one thing I don't trust, yet, is the ext4 filesystem. Only one machine -a home laptop with a new HDD- got built up with ext4 on the clean install, and after less than two months that laptop no longer boots after the machine powered off unexpectedly. Filesystems should not do that. I have no further data/experience on ext4 reliability, but it does worry me. I'm curious if anyone is using ext4 at scale in their datacentres, and if so, how reliable its been. Of course, if your datacentre has a power system which never fails, these problems may not show up. At least, not at first.