On 29/04/12 20:54, alan c wrote:
On 29/04/12 18:55, Barry Drake wrote:
I've spent quite a bit of time on Ubuntu Help today as the questions
were overwhelming the regular folk so I took a few on board. There are
a vast number of folk who have virtually trashed their system by trying
to do an upgrade. This is exactly the problem I had when upgrading my
netbook, so I did a clean install. But I'm fairly paranoid about
backups so this was easy. Can we press for much bigger warnings in
future telling folk that if they go any further with the upgrade, they
risk losing everything? The live-CD gives a low key warning of sorts,
but the updater just gets on with it and thus trashes stuff. I think
the word 'sorry' has got into more of my replies today than ever before.
Regards, Barry.
Bad news Barry, thank you.
I believe that a clear, offered option of some sort of backup as part
of a preliminary to install or to version upgrade is an important
missing feature. My guess is that few if any devs get vulnerable to
the sort of issues a non techie Windows user faces. Most novices
respond to a backup question with a blank look.
well about the only thing we do actually know about people facing an
upgrade is that they are not fresh from Windows and have been using
Ubuntu for a bit! I am just doing an upgrade on my son's laptop, it
popped up a dialog telling me there was an upgrade and a heap of stuff I
didn't read. It then told me something about third party sources, but
there was only a close button on that so I didn't have to understand it.
What would be the point of adding a backup option if novices wouldn't
take it? What would such an option do? Where would it back stuff up to?
What would be the procedure for doing a restore from this backup? Would
that reliably work?
Use of a CD to install is probably daunting enough to warn off the
less confident users, but the online upgrade is SO beguiling, and is
also very assertively advertised, that vulnerable novices can make
significant mistakes or worse.
it says "do you want to upgrade?" and you can say yes or no to it.
Clearly "yes" is the preferred option, but why shouldn't we encourage
people to upgrade to new cool stuff that will make their experience
better (which is the aim of it, sometimes that doesn't work out so well)?
I know that one vulnerable guy I helped did a version upgrade by
mistake when all he thought he doing was a regular update. It had
unfortunate consequences, it was going from Kubuntu (kde2) to Kubuntu
(kde3) and the gui shock he experienced - with me not being present to
help or explain - was enough to keep him away from K/Ubuntu and he
quietly then stayed on Windows from then onwards.
yes, but the upgrade worked, he just didn't get on with the new features
he upgraded to.
As Ubuntu rolls out to a greatly expanded user base, I believe it is
important to show a more prudent face about version upgrades - and
installs.
In a related experience, I am still aware that a while back, the Wubi
based Ubuntu systems were occasionally vulnerable to some grub updates
(grub2 maybe? less so for grub 1), for some reason, I am not sure
what. But a non booting Wubi system is not something I would want a
novice to risk, and afaik, wubi is *aimed* at novices. I sometimes
check what the latest information is about this weakness, and I think
it still exists. Unfortunately, I know people who have chosen to use a
wubi install, and treat it as if it is enduring, not a temporary easy
trial. I do hope they have a backup.
yeah, wubi is a bit of a worry, unfortunately with bad practices of
using all 4 primary partitions by OEMs it remains one of the easiest
ways to get Ubuntu to coexist with Windows on a single drive for people
who want that.
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