Coming from a very Linux oriented background, I tend to be familiar with ways of upgrading to the latest versions of the distros I use. On Fedora and many RPM based distros, you can upgrade from the CD by booting off the CD or you can use Yum (if its a recent version). On all debian based distros that use Apt, you can just do a ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ and get up to the latest version of your distro.

I’ve gotten used to that. Its normal to me, it makes sense. What I’m not used to is a graphical application that will do the upgrade for me. Synaptic in the past didn’t do that, even if it was the best package management front end out there.

Ubuntu takes things to a whole new level. Seriously. I’m sitting here typing this in Firefox on my “breezy” machine and at the same time, I have a graphical application thats taking care of all the downloads, updates and installation details for me. No more worrying about changing my sources.list file. No more hassles. Just run the new update-manager application and let it do its thing.

In all honesty, its the easiest upgrade I’ve ever experienced of any OS and I’m muchly impressed by it. Definitely a good thing to have done. Kudos Ubuntu and Canonical.

Wish they’d released that for the alpha’s. When I upgraded my laptop to Dapper a few weeks ago, I had to do it the old fashioned way.