Mostly Harmless

Doing an OS upgrade is often troublesome. It is better to back up your data and do a clean install. Most of us don’t for various reasons. I always try upgrades before clean installs - it’s probably a form of self abuse.

This version of Kubuntu has a shiny new upgrade wizard which made this a pretty easy upgrade and would definitely be do-able for the Linux Newbie. However there are still a couple of gotchas that might catch out Mr “average user”.

Following the upgrade instructions here is simple, but could do with being in better English. Screenshots or even a screencast would lessen the opportunity for error. A user who wishes to upgrade may not be wholly comfortable adding a source for example and need a little hand holding.
The upgrade took about three hours to download (2GB) and then about half an hour to apply on my Core2 Duo system.

The only actual difficulty was when mdadm installed. This is probably part of my system because my hardware features onboard RAID controllers, however the only active RAID is hardware only and thus transparent to the operating system. I was asked the question “which arrays should be started on boot?” - the correct answer is none. Answering all or entering devices may prevent your system booting if like me you do not have any arrays. If questions like this are likely to occur, information on how to answer the questions (other than the normal “go read man mdamn” bs) should be readily available to the user when the question is presented.

On reboot, SMB4K refused to mount shares once again as a user, this can be fixed by a quick