Just upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 from 11.10 and the process was painless. I’ve been using Ubuntu from release 4.10 for which support finished in 2006 so it must have been released around 2004. In the early days upgrades were a bit of a lottery but of course at that stage PC’s were not the state of the art things they are nowadays. Usually there was an issue and the issue invariably centred around video drivers. However now the upgrade process is smooth and clean and that includes me using multiple screens!
“Ubuntu just works” – that was its tag line for years and indeed over the past several incarnations in my experience it does. If it needs a driver or app to do something it will go find it and install it for you, no fuss – unlike Windows which builds up your expectations only to dash them if it’s not something that Microsoft likes.
Of course the main selling point is that it’s all free. Ubuntu’s version of Office is LibreOffice and it opens MS Office files easily and you can create new files and save them as MS Office versions – so no problem there then.
I mainly use Ubuntu rather than my Windows 7 machine (have a dual boot system) and for developers it runs VmWare Workstation/Player and Oracle’s VirtualBox if you want to try out multiple OS’s.
It may not be for everyone, but for those that want to try it you can create a bootable CD and try it on your own PC without doing any damage or installing anything – for the instructions on how to create a CD visit this link. http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/try-ubuntu-before-you-install.
You can also create a bootable USB stick if you feel so inclined!