I just upgraded first my desktop and then my primary domain / LDAP server to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Everything went very smooth on the desktop, but I did it as a full install onto a new 64 GB SSD hard drive, with a HDD for the /home directory.

The server however broke phpldapadmin which was installed, and caused all my custom puppet scripts to fail due to bad design based on poor documentation. As usual, they moved my cheese. That's why I wait for the LTS upgrades for servers, which is what it's designed for anyway.

On the desktop though I must say - the reviews don't do it justice. I was reading the news on the net about what changed and thinking "well that's not much." Boy was I wrong! There's a lot of little attention to detail and just plain... smoothness to it that wasn't there before. It's truly a polished release. The only issue I had was related to using Thunderbird. They package Thunderbird, but they don't allow installation of Lightning from a package because there's no 64 bit version in the package system. I had to find the beta 64 bit version of Lightning and manually install it.

And as for all the hubub over switching to Yahoo as the default search engine - it apparently didn't happen. But the darn window buttons were annoying before I switched them back to what I'm used to.

I just did a normal upgrade of suggested security patches that included a kernel update. I typically run dual monitors using "Twinview" that allows me to drag windows from one monitor to another.

After the upgrade, the drivers refuse to recognize the second monitor. I've swapped cables and both monitors work, but even after swapping it defaults back to the right hand screen. The NVidia control panel swears that I only have one screen attached.

I've tried restoring my xorg.conf file from backup, blowing it away entirely and recreating it with the NVidia tool and manually editing it by hand all to no avail. Something seems to have broken twinview in the new updates.

Very frustrating...

Update...

Turns out the monitor cable was at fault - the cable fine after swapping to the other port, but it wouldn't detect that the monitor was there when things were started up. Weird that it didn't occur until a reboot.

I had three more issues that occurred after upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. First, it switched the sound system over to "pulseaudio" which broke the mic input and made audio output somewhat scratchy. I didn't realize this until I tried to use Skype. The solution:

sudo apt-get uninstall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo reboot

I usually use an external mouse so I also didn't realize that the touchpad worked perfectly at the GDM login window, but after logging in it would stop and no amount of coaxing would bring it back. Turns out the upgrade disabled the checkbox under System + Preferences + Mouse + Touchpad. Just plug in a USB mouse and check that box again and the touchpad worked beautifully.

One last thing is that my changes to X to enable the media buttons on the side of the laptop no longer functions. I haven't found a solution to this one yet, but probably is related to the changes in the way X handles all the input devices.