I upgraded my 13.04 system this morning and now it is unfortunately unusable. Any time I try to switch users, it consistently brings me to a black screen with a frozen mouse pointer that I cannot get out of, even when hitting Ctrl+Alt+F#. I'm downloading the iso now to try a fresh install.
Nvidia, AMD, or Intel?
Proprietary or open source drivers?
I often have problems during upgrades using the proprietary drivers. The solution is usually:
1. Uninstall proprietary drivers.
2. Reboot, make sure the fallback mesa/vesa works (i.e. you can boot to graphical login).
3. Install proprietary drivers again.
4. Reboot, make sure the graphical login works, then run glxinfo | grep -i opengl, and make sure the renderer is GeForce or Radeon or whatever, NOT "Mesa".
Yes, it's stupid, and yes, we shouldn't have these problems in 2013, but the proprietary drivers tend to just have more compatibility issues.
Here's a video of a continuous upgrade from ms-dos through every windows version all up to windows 7 (a timespan of ~20 years) that proves it's possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14
The whole time I was watching this I was thinking, how would I explain to a normal human being why it is that I can't look away. Windows 3.0 especially took me back to my adolescence, like a smell.
It's not all Canonical's faults. A highly customized install with a few extra libs here and there and some proprietary softare can easily wreck havoc on a system.
I had a continuous Arch install for 4 years without massive breakage through half a dozen major switches, including the fs layout and the systemd transition.
I just upgraded to an SSD and decided to clean slate rather than carry extra fs creep baggage that isn't linked to a package to remove, but I still have that partition around, and I'm pretty sure if I upgraded it it might still boot.
It is why I like rolling releases - rather than have catastrophic breakage every half year, you continuously migrate upwards. It means occasionally you need to pull up a web browser to see why your desktop is missing, but its better than doing a dist-upgrade and getting an unbootable system.
My Debian installation has been the same for six years and survived moving from Gnome → XFCE → Fluxbox → Awesome and installing bleeding-edge mesa and radeon drivers, plus other kinds on tinkering. Oh, and moving to an SSD.
And I since 9.10. Sure, I've had my problems with it due to certain customisations applied, but to the best of my knowledge nothing that I haven't brought on myself, and I've been able to sort it out each time without significant trouble.
I guess I should stop using my Debian machines where I did an install in previous decades (decades, plural) and copied the setup from hard drive to hard drive across several physical machine rebuilds. Up to now I had no idea that this never works smoothly.
If you're the sort of person that likes to try out stuff from different places, including compiled binaries, non-repo packages, and other fun stuff, eventually stuff will break. A lot of desktop pieces of software have config files that keep changing.
I've found that keeping your old /home around and a copy of installed packages works well enough for most situations.
Actually I do keep around a few old binaries, and I have more often seen something else: software that no longer compiles with a modern compiler, but the binary I built in 2000 still works.
We're talking about Ubuntu here - that was my point.
I've been upgrading Ubuntu Desktop for years (a decade, singular) and I've always been struggling - especially if I ventured to install an alpha and then keep upgrading that. Compared to OS X, on which I always upgrade to the first Developer Preview and keep upgrading on, although OS X comes with problems, too, the GM usually fixes it all up. With Ubuntu, it's best to script your environment and rebuild clean. At least my experience. Garbage always piles up otherwise!
I've only ever had one hose my system but that's because I locked the screen while the upgrade was in progress. The upgrade never finished because I couldn't unlock and answer any of its conflict resolution questions.
Mine (Asus Zenbook ux31a) doesn't even boot to dekstop anymore with the default kernel. X server just says fatal error, no screens found. Using kernel 3.8 now and things seems to work.
