I got a little saucy the other day and decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Alpha 2 of Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04). What the heck, I had a 9.10 install disc so I could always back out if it got too ugly, right?

It got ugly.

During the update, the nVidia drivers choked and died; they were erroring out and leaving the isntallation in a half-baked state. I finally managed to get them uninstalled and finish installing everything else, sans nVidia drivers. Meh, I can live with the nv drivers.

After rebooting I find that Awesome, my window manager of choice, no longer works. Well, it "works", but not in any way I can use. Calibre, my ebook library manager, is also DOA. And I no longer have any volume controls!

But everything else works suprisingly well. After getting rid of HAL, booting and shutting down is very fast, although usbmount has a couple of quirks that need ironing out (like mounting everything writable only by root).

An update a couple days later fixed the Awesome and Calibre problems...but apt wanted to install some piece of software called Virtuoso; I had to look it up. It's a server for the soprano search backend. So, it's a server for the backend of a service, or something. Ok, that's getting ridiculous.

I've been using KDE for awhile. 3.5 was great. The 4 series...not so much. Sure it looks nice and has all sorts of features, but it's just dog slow. That's what drove me to Awesome; I was looking for a lightweight WM for my aging laptop and liked it so much I started using it on my desktop. The only thing keeping me with KDE was Amarok. And now here's this Virtuoso software..a plugin to a plugin to a search framework that in my experience is broken. Or something. Bloat.

Enough. I took another plunge and purged KDE completely. Amarok has been replaced by Exaile. I love Amarok's features (Exaile doesn't come close), but it just comes with too much KDE baggage. Sorry, Amarok. I'm sure I'll miss you too, K3B, but I want to use my CPU and RAM for other things.

Hello, Lucid! Goodbye, KDE!