A sunny Friday when it’s just a bit too cold to want to roam outside, but the only real “work” I have to do today is a few water changes and fixing the space bar on a laptop that’s popped its clip. I’m sitting here at my desk, looking across the room at my laptop, and thinking about installing the alpha version of Jaunty on it. It’s barely past 0900h, so I’ve got the whole day ahead of me. Hmmm…
Pros:
- I’d get to use new software, which is always fun.
- I’d get to see the new themes in action (though I have put them on Intrepid on my desktop).
- I’d get to mess around with customising a default install to make it look and work the way I want.
- I’d have time and a non-critical computer to figure out the way to turn off the new “awesomeness” in Epiphany, and any other new features I decide I don’t like.
Cons:
- Since I’d be doing a clean install (could upgrade, but I like neat, clean installs with no chance of “leftovers”) I’d have to re-install stuff like my Nautilus actions, and my T-bird address book, FF bookmarks (and more importantly, extensions), in addition to backing up all of the stuff in my /home (since I’m a dumbass and never have got around to putting that on a separate partition). None of that is difficult or even particularly time-consuming, but unless I make a list, I’m sure to forget something, and the time at which I’ll discover that I need (a particular function) will be at 0300h when I’m too drunk to trust myself with “sudo”.
- It’s still in alpha, and although I don’t care much about instability because it’s only my laptop, not my “mission critical” desktop, that does mean a lot of updates as bugs get fixed. Again, not difficult, and no big deal if I’m sitting in the living room, or even sitting up in bed, but it’s a pain in the arse to type my password with one finger if I’m lying in bed with the laptop on the little table beside me. My own fault for a long password with all of letters, numbers and special characters, but still a pain in the arse, and even though it doesn’t pop up or nag (I’m lookin’ at you, Windows!) I can’t stand to see the “Updates available” icon sitting in the Panel, silently accusing me of being too lazy to click and type a password.
- Having to comment lines out of menu.lst if there are updates to the kernel. That happened when I had…um…I think it was the Hardy beta on it, and it confused P. because there were so many entries in Grub that he couldn’t see the XP entry at the bottom of the list, and didn’t know he had to arrow down, so he thought, “Her Linux wiped out my XP,” and ended up doing a restore from the Vaio backup partition (the only entry he could see besides the Linux ones), which of course wiped out any personal stuff he had on there, plus it ultimately failed, and XP wouldn’t boot anyway (“incomplete install”) until I fixed it. His fault, I suppose, since I’d have known what to do if he’d taken five seconds to show me the damned screen, but it’s still a pain to have so many entries.
- It won’t take long to do the install–under half an hour–but it will take longer than that to make it look and work the way I want, and that will cut into time I could be spending doing fuck-all on a sunny Friday. There’s no way I could leave a default install just sitting there, being all default-y, so I’m looking at…oh, probably a couple of hours total before I’m completely satisfied.
- Ubuntu always Just Worksâ„¢ on the laptop, so that won’t tell me anything about what I really want to know, which is how well an un-fucked-with PulseAudio will handle sound on my desktop with various applications. It’s always Just Workedâ„¢ on the desktop, too, but I somehow managed to make my master volume control…uh…”go away” in the panel applet, and since it does still work (and I still have the multi-channel volume control for VLC and PulseAudio’s master for everything else) I don’t want to mess around too much with it. If my desktop doesn’t have properly functioning sound, and I want music (and I will!) then all I can do is connect speakers to the laptop and SSH to the desktop (or use earphones on my phone…meh), but the laptop has only crappy two-channel sound, so I can’t even duplicate channels to 5.1 for mp3.
Okay…more cons than pros, and now that I’ve spent approxmiately 20 minutes deliberating, I think I’ll leave the laptop with Intrepid for now. We’re supposed to get scattered showers all weekend, and it’s not going to be really warm (only 11C on Sat, 17C on Sun…crap), so maybe I’ll change my mind if I don’t feel like going outside on one of those days. Maybe I’ll find something else to do–haven’t attempted to break anything on my iPhone in a while–and just wait for the beta. Dunno yet. 😀
