All right, so when I woke up for work on the 31st, there was a distro upgrade available. At this point, I was about ready to throw my laptop out the window - 9.04 was buggy for me, with very unstable 3D acceleration, problems with sound output, the headphone jacks - there wasn't much that wasn't borked in some manner or another. Really not very fun to deal with - the CPU was working its ass off to keep things moving on the screen, so my battery life peaked at maybe 2 hours. Overall, it was piss-poor. So, I went for the upgrade without any research - fuck, if I lost everything, I wouldn't really give a damn. So, went for the upgrade, and went for work.

Came back home to find the boot screen on 9.10, Karmic Koala, and upon logging in, I found that all the problems had just evaporated. Proper video drivers, better sound, and with that there was the capacity for all sorts of eye-candy now that the machine was in proper order. Aside from that, there's some interesting new utilities - the Software Center replaces Add/Remove from later versions, which is actually pretty nice, despite skepticism. Additionally, there's an Art Manager for downloading appearance packs straight from art.gnome, which is really handy.

All in all I think it's a great upgrade, and I know lots of people with HP boxes were having big problems. I think that now would be the time to give Ubuntu a shot, if you're curious - this is definitely one of the better releases I've seen.

Although I do sort of reminisce about 6.06, way back in the day, when things were simple, and I was but a noob...