------------------------------------------------------------
Technology/OS, (sdf.org), 07/10/2018
------------------------------------------------------------
I was feeling saucy on Friday and decided that I would
upgrade my Ubuntu 16.04 to the new-fangled 18.04. It failed
miserably, and broke all kinds of things. I fixed several of
them, then got tired of fixing things. To be fair to the
Ubuntu folks, this was a very old install that had been
dist-upgraded a few times, on an SSD that had been moved
from a desktop to a laptop. There was a lot of old cruft in
there.
At that point I considered OpenBSD, and said "nah." I've
been down that road, and it wasn't all that special to me
(sorry SDF). Maybe on some other system, but not this one,
not right now. I tried on Debian 9. Things worked pretty
well after a little bit of configuration, but I was getting
a random black screen of demise (no, it wasn't thermal
shutdown, I kept a close eye on that.) Since it was a fresh
install, instead of dealing with it, I figured I'd try a
fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04.
I'm not a fan of the whiz-bang default desktop environment.
Neither am I a fan of the alternative distros (xubuntu, lx,
etc.) But, everything was working swimmingly, so I replaced
gdm3 with lightdm, installed spectrwm, and am now
operational again. It was easy enough to restore my
configurations from backup. Mostly, it feels like nothing
went wrong on Friday.
The benefit at this point is, all that junk that was
lingering is cleaned out. I have quite a bit of disk space
freed up, and a tiny bit of memory freed up (I ran pretty
lean before.) Life is good for now. Maybe things will be the
same after I figure out all of the software that I need, but
it's nice to start over, after such a long run with that
install (and being too lazy to manage it well.)
