Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

My first experience was with a very old system. It's an old
Dell server with two 400 MHz Pentium II CPUs, 1.5 GB RAM
and SCSI hard drives. I used the Upgrade button in the
Update Manager dialog. It ran more or less all day on this
slow hardware. The download got interrupted once but
it was able to resume without any trouble.

• System wouldn't reboot. It got the error "Gave up waiting for root device" and came up in the BusyBox shell. There's some discussion of this error here. If I exited out of BusyBox it would then come up. Fixed by adding 'rootdelay = 60' to the boot lines in /boot/grub/menu.lst.
• Window manager apparently not working. No bar above the windows with Menu, Maximize, Minimize, Close. Can't move windows. Can't change to a different virtual desktop. See this. Workaround: I tried switching my visual effects setting from 'none' to 'normal' and that fixed it.
• No virtual terminals. CTRL-[ALT-]-FN buttons take me to screens with video confetti or sometimes a flashing cursor. No fix/workaround for this yet.

I tried the upgrade on my laptop. This is about a 2 year old Compaq
6715b with dual core Athlon 64, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB 7200 RPM
SATA drive, wireless. Just downloading the over 3400 packages
took about 12 hours, then it took another about 12 hours to finish
the upgrade. With certain packages it stops to ask you questions
and I wasn't sitting right there looking at it the whole time so it's
likely for a few hours of that second 12 it was just sitting there
waiting at a prompt. At one point wireless was down but it needed
the network and I had to cable up ethernet. When it finally rebooted
I saw issues with Gnome similar to the first system only worse. I
couldn't work around by changing the visual effects. Also after a
few tries most of my panel disappeared. Wireless did
come back up. I didn't really have a lot of time to mess around
and wound up recovering 9.10 from backups.

So far, this is pretty disappointing... 9.10 was a lot smoother.

Lots of people are having this problem. For some switching
window managers (metacity to compiz or vice versa) seems to
fix it:

• My window captions are gone
• Title bars are missing after upgrade to Lucid
• Problems with the window manager
• Window borders keep disappearing
• Windows effects lost after logout/in and no titlebar
• Lucid Lynx 10.04 no minimize, maximize or close buttons

On my old clunker, I tried creating a new user and everything
worked fine with the new user. So I guess the way to recover
from this is to create a new user, then carefully move everything
but the config files from the old user to the new user.

Second try on the laptop. I tried the procedure described above,
still couldn't get things working with Metacity. Resigning myself
to Compiz for now.

Performance on my laptop OpenGL graphics is terrible.
(It's an ATI Radeon 1200). Also I get artifacts in some
OpenGL applications like Google Earth and SecondLife
(though frankly the Linux SecondLife client has not been
usable for me on any distro for a long time).
System->Administration->Hardware Drivers does not
offer any proprietary graphics driver. Envy does not
support Lucid. According to the AMD web site, my
graphics hardware has been moved to legacy support and
there will be no updates to the driver software after 2/2009.
This didn't work... when I tried running aticonf it said
something like 'no supported device was found'. This
messed up my desktop and even after uninstalling the
fglrx packages the window manager was not working
right. For a second time I bailed on Ubuntu 10.04 and
restored 9.10. It kind of looks like you can't get the
proprietary driver for 'legacy' ATI graphics devices and
the freeware drivers aren't so hot.