Recently, i upgraded two systems. My main desktop to Ubuntu 9.10 and my brand new portable brain to Windows 7. Both of which were free (albeit, one came with the purchase price of the machine, but it's not like i was able to order it without). It's interesting to compare the upgrade process to both.
On Ubuntu, the attempted upgrade didn't work. Things broke. My audio went to half volume, and in the process of digging for the solution, i wound up installing a driver that required LaTex (the document formatting package) in order to build. For those of you unfamiliar with this, imagine being told that the only way to get your printer to set up was to tune your bedroom radio to a country western radio station. Yeah, that's what kind of disconnect it is. Eventually, i solved the Ubuntu upgrade process by effectively nuking the old version from orbit, and having everything rebuild itself from scratch.
Mind you, that's something i've had to do with most every other "upgrade" in the past (regardless of operating system) and is one of the big reasons i always install the OS to one partition, but put data files and important stuff on another. After the upgrade, i spend part of a day re-installing packages, turning off stupid glitz, reconfiguring various things and wrapping in the plumbing to let me get on with where i was before. So, it took about a day and a half to get my desktop upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu.
My track record with Windows is far worse, so i was expecting far worse of an experience. It didn't happen. i can honestly say that upgrading from the installed Vista to Win7 wasn't as bad as i expected. i still had to do a bunch of things like turn off Aero, reset the title bar font to something less huge, tweak the desktop icon sizes to "My eyesight isn't that bad yet, thank you" and other bits, but the general install didn't require any partition scrubbing.
Both have one thing that annoys me more than it should. With Ubuntu, it's the fact that compiz isn't being started (and i've not found the appropriate xinitrc file to insert it as my window manager). Annoying but something i can work around easily and fix. Windows 7 has the amazingly annoying new task bar, which i can't revert to something more sane. (i'm sorry, but for the record, the Mac Docker is equally poorly designed since it fails to convey to me information about the window or task i'm looking for. i use many browsers to do many different things, dog piling them onto each other doesn't help.)
Still, on the whole, upgrading and de-glitzing Windows7 took FAR less time than Ubuntu did.
(i still prefer Ubuntu, though. On this system, if there's something that bugs me, there's a damn good chance i can fix it.)
