I'm using a beta Lucid also and very happy with it's performance, appearance
and stability. It works on my MSI Wind while the final version of it's
predecessor had an incurable flashing video problem. However, when the final
release version comes out next month I will do a clean install as there may
be fixes and features that I'll need. Then I will leave it alone until the
next long term support release.

Only you can decide how often to upgrade. For the tinkerer there is a new
opportunity every April and October... for us less adventurous types it's
best to stick with the 'long term' releases.

I have been running Lucid since Alpha 1 and it is now stable enough for me to
use every day. I still have my Karmic installation, but have not been into it
for a week or so.

I plan on doing an upgrade with RC1 on my Karmic partition and then fresh
installation once the final is out (a couple of weeks later actually due to
inevitable slow servers), but there is no need to. It is just my established
practice. My Lucid installation is on my experimental partition which will
become 10.10 when it comes out in the summer. This is my way of doing things.

There are many reasons to do a fresh installation. There are always residual
traces of the previous one that can make your system not a good as if you do a
clean installation. It makes troubleshooting a lot easier, for one thing.

There are equally compelling reasons to not do one such as if you have lots of
packages that you don't want to install afterwards or have bandwidth
restrictions. If you find installing worrisome then it may be a reason to keep
it as it is.

In either case you should use a cleaner to remove old kernels and package
caches.

For Karmic users, there are lots of improvements aside from the look and feel.
The performance is great. There will also be the Me Go Menu for social
networking and the Ubuntu One music store in Rhythmbox. KDE users get KDE 4.4
with lots of improvements. You can now have icons on the desktop without the
folder view plasma and a different wallpaper or activity on separate desktops.
Choosing widgets or plasmas is now drag and drop. However, as always if you are
happy with what you have then upgrading can be more of a headache than it is
worth. Nvidia users need to be especially wary. The default driver will be
Nouveau which is so far only 2D (no desktop effects or compositing). You need to
use the proprietary ones which work fine and give 3D. No big deal, but it is
just another hoop to jump through.

Kudos to Canonical for their implementation of Plymouth with Nvidia cards. I had
to live without 3D for a few weeks (Alpha 1 & 2), but then it just worked when
Alpha 3 came out. BTW, Nouveau will eventually give 3D. They are working on it
with some success. It should be available this spring. (Fedora in contrast does
not provide any help. It is up to the community to provide solutions. Fedora
gives you Nouveau and that is it. Getting 3D to work in Fedora is not for the
faint of heart.)

I installed the proprietary nvidia drivers from synaptic as in past
releases, no problem. The surprising thing is that the proprietary
nvidia drivers were available for an alpha release.

For nvidia cards, the default driver has *always* been the unaccelerated
nv driver. If you wanted hardware accelerated 3D support, you had to
choose the proprietary nvidia driver.

Making nouveau the default, rather than the bare-bones, unaccelerated nv
driver seems like a win to me, since the nouveau driver does have more
capability than the nv, and it is being actively improved as time goes by.

So, I guess I don't understand what you're saying - how is it any worse
to have nouveau as the default, rather than nv? The steps to activate
the proprietary nvidia driver are the same as before.

It isn't any worse; both suck. The only time that I have used NV was
recently with Alpha 1 and 2. I use the proprietary ones because I use
compositing. When Nouveau matures and has 3D then its use will not be an
issue with me. At present Nouveau does not provide any 3D capabilities such
as desktop effects and compositing. For me this means no Compiz in GNOME or
KDE effects. I don't care much about the cube, etc, but am used to a Mac OSX
style bar at the bottom for launching my frequently used applications, etc.,
and most require compositing. I have long ago abandoned Ubuntu's bottom
panel which is useless in the extreme. There are several non-composited
panels such as Cool Dock, but they butcher the graphics screen. Anything
touching the panel does not refresh quickly enough and you get ghosting text
which makes scrolling web pages hard. (I have a 512 MB card so it is not the
speed of my card and I don't have this issue with AWN or Fancy Panel in KDE
both of which require compositing). I have used desktop effects for years
and to be forced to do without it, even for a time, is frustrating and a
step backwards.

I tried the proprietary drivers with Alpha 1 and 2 and they would not work.
They could be installed but could not be activated, so I was stuck with 2D.
A couple of times I could not get into a GUI at all, so had to work from
terminal to straighten it out. That is all behind me, now. As I said
Canonical has got it right by Alpha 3 and without all of the fuss that
Fedora users must go through. The proprietary Nvidia drivers do not work
well with Fedora 12. You can't shut off Nouveau without editing grub
manually, (even after the proprietary drivers are installed it will default
to Nouveau). If you update the kernel then you have to repeat this process
each time. This is my benchmark for how NOT to do it.

For non-Nvidia users a word of explanation. Drivers for many graphics cards
give desktop effects out of the box, but Nvidia is an exception because
Nvidia does not trust anybody with its secrets. Nouveau involves backwards
engineering compatibility and that takes time. Intel and ATI have released
open source drivers. Nvidia does however work closely with the open source
community and have a good record of being fast to release their proprietary
drivers. It was onlya year ago, (when Jaunty came out) that Nvidia worked
out of the box, but Intel users were stuck without 3D drivers (because
graphics control was switched to the kernel and Intel dithered).

Many distros such as Mandriva and openSuSE provide proprietary drivers out
of the box. This is not the Ubuntu philosophy. Once Nouveau provides 3D then
Ubuntu will catch up in user experience out of the box, except when it comes
to multimedia where it will still lag behind Mint and the previously
mentioned distros. My opinion is that it does not have to be this way. They
could have a totally free distro like GnewSense for those who want it or a
simple check box in the installation process of any of their brands. Of
course if they did this then Mint would have to find a new hook. Isn't it
just Ubuntu without the hassle?

To answer everyone who reply back to me, thank you very much, I like Joe's
answer the best, now I never knew we had a cleaner to get rid of the old
kernels!! That really amuses me that it's one out there.

To answer questions about what kind of nivida driver card I have, it says I have
a GeForce ????? I am not really for sure :p I bought this eMachine computer
like 3 years ago. It's still going strong yet! I just wanted to buy a cheap
computer, that is what I did and installed Ubuntu. Well actually I started off
with Mandriva and then I went from that to Ubuntu!


Yes, they don't have much problems with any crashes or anything like that which
really it's so much nicer than the last release. I swear that the last release
was making my harddrive not work correctly.

And nivida drivers and working all ready makes it great! I have a big monitor
and it works in 1600x1050!

Email, Music and surfing on the net is awesome, oh and the game section got
gbrainy which is fun!

I'm running 10.04 alpha on 2 boxes, and have been happy with its
stability - I've never seen an alpha release with so few bugs, nor have
I seen an alpha release of any distro that had working nvidia drivers,
until now. There are a few minor nits, but I don't mind, as it's
definitely good enough for my daily use for email, web browsing and music.

As to your question, you do not have to reinstall. As long as you let it
do the updates, it will be automatically updated to the final release. I
started out with alpha1, and it's updated itself to alpha 2 and alpha 3
since then.