Upgrading from Oneiric to Lucid

by kengilmer

Upon getting my new thinkpad I was faced with the question of what to install.  I’d been pretty happy with 10.04, and so I thought I’d continue that.  I’d read here and there that 11.10 was better than 11.04 but there still seemed to be a lot of unhappy campers.  I myself had mindlessly upgraded to 11.04 only to come to realize that I should have stayed with 10.04.  So, given this I burned a fresh copy of Lucid to a USB disc and got crankin’.  

However, after some time installing I came to realize that the kernel version that ships with 10.04 is too old for the hardware in my x220.  I had no networking capability which made it quite a struggle to look for updates.  I played around with “sideloading” kernel images but after a few hours of toiling thought to myself “how bad could Oneiric be?”  I considered other distros but came to the conclusion that the time to learn/tune Unity would be less than the time to learn some whole other world of stuff.  And besides, I like Ubuntu.  I like the guys that put it together.  Over the years they’ve saved me a lot of time and hassle. So, off to Oneiric it was.

…3 weeks pass…

Oneiric was almost good enough, and if haddn’t had such a good experience with 10.04 I might have just been happy.  After tweaking and tuning, finding howto guides on smoothing out the edges, and generally just trying to learn the Unity way, I had a pretty decent setup.  Today however, a straw broke and that straw consisted of:

  • The 200 ~ 400 ms it takes for the application (task?) switcher to render after pressing alt-tab.
  • Being presented with photos and music when trying to launch an application.
  • Finding an install guide for 10.04 on the x220.

Dash, aesthetically is very pleasing.  But for me who uses the computer to get work done, it’s maybe a little too slick.  I do not want to see family photos when I’m trying to launch a tool.  I don’t care about my music collection.  I want to run my tools and get stuff done.  Dash showing me my media collection is just a rub, but the half second it takes for me to switch applications, in the end, was a deal breaker.  

Half a work day later, I’m back to 10.04 with a backported Natty kernel that seems to be fine with my Sandybridge rig.  And now that I’m here, I feel right at home :)  

 

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