Working in I/T seems to breed a paradox in expectations. On one side of that proverbial coin, it's a truism that developers underestimate--sometimes grossly--the amount of complexity, time and bugs will be involved in code they develop. On the flip-side, there's no small part of paranoia in trusting code not written by themselves or their most reliable colleagues.
Thus, although I've experienced the brilliance of the Ubuntu developers, testers and packagers time and again, I backed up all critical files before upgrading. As it turns out, hardware was ultimately the culprit, bringing to life the worse-case scenario of rebuilding and reconfiguring my workaday setup. "Worse-case," you'll note--not "worst case." (There's plenty more room on the darker end of the good-bad-ugly spectrum.)
Time I could have used for creating stuff is now irrevocably lost to the process of upgrading, debugging, reinstalling, and configuring--all bookended by schlepping files between internal and external hard drives. That's the "lemon" part. The "lemonade" payoff comes in terms of a cleaner computer, and a healthy triaging of applications and data. In other words, the evolution of Ubuntu Linux emphatically does not select for fatter pack-rats.
Understand that I'm not looking down on Windows or Mac users when I write this, but I wonder whether folks on those platforms wouldn't ultimately be happier with those systems if an upgrade (and a highly recommended backup prior to it) were available in a span of months rather than years.
