I upgraded my home desktop to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) as soon as it came out last week. I used the feature in the Upgrade Manager which told me the new version was available so doing the actual upgrade was fairly idiot proof.
Since then Firefox (version 3 beta) has been broken, the menu's don't work, I click on them and nothing happens, as if they were disabled. Also the user interface locks up after five to ten minutes of doing anything. When it happens again the menu's die, the mouse moves about and some of the panel widgets work but essentially it is useless. Ctrl-alt-backspace fortunately works so I can reboot the desktop and start again.
World of Warcraft is the only thing that works for any period of time ( 
). Apart from that the system is useless and I've had to use Windows.
I've googled and found other people complaining about 8.04 but they appear to have kernel lockups which would be much more dire.
It's a pity as I had been enjoying using a linux desktop. The only thing that didn't work before was my printer and I hadn't put any effort into fixing that.
I had already upgraded my Mythical Convergence Box to Xubuntu 8.04 which is Ubuntu with a lean mean xfce user interface rather than gnome. Xfce gives a passable Windowsy level of functionality. That box is running just fine and now reacts to the Hauppauge Remote Control. Unfortunately 8.04 has a newer version of mythtv so if I rolled my desktop back to the previous version (gutsy gibbbon) I wouldn't be able to use a gutsy mythtv frontend with the hardy backend and I don't want to roll the myth box back.
When gnome is working on Hardy it has changed it's behaviour somewhat. The application menu works in a contrary way such that the menu is only there while your mouse button is down so you press your mouse down to open it, find your menu item while holding the button down and then release to activate. I can see that this needs just a mouse down and up rather than two clicks but it's annoyingly different, especially as I can't find a way to turn it off.
Gnome also has interesting behaviour when moving windows around in that it tries to guess where you are dragging it to and how big the window will be. I can drag a maximised app from one screen to another and even though the screens are different sizes I get the result I want. I think this may actually be useful once I learn to predict what it is going to do.
Conclusion: I wish I'd waited for 8.0.5 
I may go back to gutsy on the desktop and live without the myth frontend for a while. I don't want to go back to windows.
Peter's Moblog
