A very drawback of Ubuntu Linux is that upgrading to a new distribution could be an unexpectedly painful experience. As an old fan who first tried it out at the version 9.04, I have been using Ubuntu for about 7 years, but it seems the crashes will never disappointed me when upgrading to a new distribution, surely including the accident happened yesterday.
I enjoy the UI of Ubuntu as well as many of its easy-to-use features, while the stability could vary among different distributions. Therefore, I carefully chose the 14.04 LTS (Long time support) distribution instead of the latest one when I got my new laptop one year ago. So when I heard about the 16.04 LTS has released several months ago, though the LTS version could be a guarantee of the stability and performance, I really don’t think it necessary for me to do that upgrade at that moment. Later one of my enthusiastic classmate told me that he installed the new version very soon, but unfortunately, it can not function well on his laptop due to some subtle incompatibles issues with drivers. So he had to turned back to 14.04 after a few time-wasting attempts. My pathetic classmate’s story discouraged me from the new distribution and also reminded me of the unsatisfying experience about this.
However, my system kept popping out the upgrade notification since the beginning of this month. In addition, I believe that 3 months is long enough for the team to bring out the real reliable distribution. So I persuaded myself, did some simple backup, forgot about the painful experience and clicked that evil upgrade button with great confidence. After a lunch, I grabbed my laptop to find the heart-breaking yet expected result – a crash, or maybe worse, a fatal error. I rebooted the system and it failed to load the kernal during the booting process. It not use to very over spilled milk, reinstall the whole system seems to be the only solution.
This made me completely believe that the success rate of upgrade Ubuntu to a new distribution is so low that you should never try to do this without any backups. This accident interrupted me from the coding job on computer, and the fatal error brought me some inspiration about my life.
I have been avoiding errors in my life. Because of the influence from some seniors and ambitious peers, I started to care about somethings like cars and girls. The fear of failure and overmuch attention on unrealistic things stop me from a real upgrade. Just like our dear operating system, the desire of new experience came along with the fear of errors, which also hampered myself from the improvement. It is the fatal error, as an unavoidable consequence, as well as a catalyst to an overall upgrade.
Apart from the tedious part about recovering my applications and settings, I felt good with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. A overall upgrade after fatal error, that is what I called Evolution.