I've had problems the last few upgrades. Things have been added to Ubuntu that I don't particularly care for. Window buttons have moved, Indicator Applets have sprung up, menu icons have vanished and each upgrade I've found myself having to "fix" things to get them back to how they were.
I'm not going to get bogged down in whether my opinion is "correct" or otherwise, just that I'd like to stay the same.
The upgrade to 11.04 poses major issues for me where all of the following statements are true:
- I like new versions of packages
- I'd like to be on the current version of Ubuntu to help people with that version
- I'm too busy to spend hours recovering my panel-based desktop configuration
- I have no desire to try Unity now. I may want to in the future, but not today, thank you.
My understanding is that the default upgrade would dump me in a Unity environment regardless of my previous desktop settings.
I'm aware of the Classic mode. My understanding is it's currently a completely new configuration of panels made to look more like Unity. I realise I could battle it to the death to get my current theme/panel-settings/pannel-applets back, but unless it just defaults to my current desktop, I'm not very interested in it. I'd rather not upgrade.
So the question is: Can I upgrade to Natty without destroying my desktop? Is there a clean upgrade path for users (for example) who have hundreds of users they can't afford to retrain right now? Or are we stuck on Maverick for the foreseeable future?
Edit: I guess to clarify a sub-questions would be: What does Classic Mode show when you do an upgrade? The old, previously configured desktop or a new stock configuration? I might have to test this in a VM to see what happens but it's a lot of bandwidth to spend on an experiment.
Edit I upgraded today. Took me to Unity, I logged out and into Classic (as expected). Most of the settings appear in tact, Compiz has a whole load of new defaults and lost settings (fair enough), most of my panel applets (window lists, clock, notification area) aren't loading. There will be a follow up question.
Best Answer
In short, probably not.
Forgetting the desktop, there were a handful of applications that I had installed on a Lucid -> Maverick box that were removed by Natty B1 installation because of missing dependencies. These weren't mainstream applications - most of which are maintained and thus version compatible with the Natty libraries, and none of them were critical to what I do so I don't remember which were removed.
Unlike that other operating system, there isn't the overbearing market need to ensure that your copy of Lotus 1-2-3 from 10 years ago still runs on the new shiny.
If you've got hundreds of users, surely one of them won't miss their computer if you "borrow" it as a sacrifice machine. Failing that, carve off some disk, or get another disk (they are stunningly cheap these days) clone off your config and upgrade the copy to see how insufferable the damage is. It may also be useful in your environment to be able to dual boot Maverick/Natty as needed.
Added: You are asking for a guarantee that only empirical testing can afford you. Ubuntu is such a hypercomplex maze of interdependencies that given a huge static survey of your current installation, I'd be hard pressed to give you a definitive answer to what will change or break. If this wasn't so, you could just upgrade the packages you wanted. But you can't do that without entering dependency hell which the modern distros work so hard at avoiding.