A little while ago I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.10 and thought just waiting for 12.04 would be a better option. But some other members of LQ advised me to wait a little bit because Ubuntu releases tend to release with a few bugs not completely worked out. It looks so nice, fast, easier to work with and stuff. Is it "safe" to install 12.04? or should I wait a few weeks still

The short answer is that no software ever has all the bugs worked out.

The longer answer is that it never hurts to wait a few weeks before doing an upgrade of anything. All the testing in the world that can be done in the lab and in beta can never turn up the problems that thousands of regular users in normal usage can discover. And it is true that Ubuntu releases may be a little buggy because their release schedule demands a release on schedule.

When I was using Ubuntu, I would generally wait a few weeks before upgrading versions of OS's. It's one of those "can't hurt, might help" things.

At the same time, I must say that in three years of using Ubuntu on a laptop and a netbook, I never had a on-line upgrade fail to complete with a successful reboot.

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A couple of key dates to consider.

10.04 (the previous Long Term Support) is supported another year until April 2013/2015 (desktop/server).

12.04 is scheduled to receive its final bug fix April 2017.

Personally I would test-drive 12.04 (as well as a few other distros) to determine not which is completely bug free (that's impossible) but which is the best fit for my needs.

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Well I know there will never be NO bugs...but I guess I was asking would it be safe to assume the bugs overlooked for the release were fixed? Even if they didn't fix EVERY bug...the update manager should provide necessary updates to fix these bugs when the bugs are fixed....right?

I have found 12.04 to work very well on my desktop and laptop. (I use the light and fast Lubuntu with the LXDE desktop instead of the more bloated Ubuntu with Unity).
There are 2 things that I always do to avoid problems with Ubuntu, or Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc:
1. I always do clean installs of Ubuntu. I never do dist-upgrades.
2. I never use any third party repos on Ubuntu. This includes those unsupported PPA repos.
I have used every single version of Ubuntu since the inaugural 4.10. By always doing clean installs and avoiding third party repos, I have managed to avoid all the multitude of problems that seem to plague so many Ubuntu users.
Many of the "bugs" that people experience are due to using unsupported third party packages on Ubuntu. Then these people do a dist-upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu and they some how expect the package manager to make sense of it all. The more you stray from the default Ubuntu repos the more you risk developing problems.

Ubuntu 12.04 has been getting good reviews, such as this one from Distrowatch: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?is...120507#feature

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Cool thanks! I was planning on doing a clean install from now on when I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.10 and another LQ member told me he likes to refer to the Upgrade Manager as the Upgrade Mangler because it tends to ruin things...

If you have a separate home directory for your data then doing a clean install of Ubuntu is is quick and painless. I do it like this:
1. Do a clean install of Ubuntu.
2. Get all of the updates to the default packages.
3. Install the extra programs that I use.
4. Customize the desktop to look and function the way that I want.

I don't use a lot of extra packages. I generally try to use the "one tool per task" philosophy as much as possible. That is, I stick with one good app for music, one good app for video, one browser for the web, one text editor, etc. This minimizes the bloat and keeps things simple.
I also tend to stick with what ever themes are provided by the distro and the desktop environment (LXDE in the case of Lubuntu).

If you do not have a separate home directory, then when you do a clean install this would be a good time to create one.

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I think your decision is quite right. I planned to do the same, but finally with the hype I couldn't wait more than 3 or 4 days and suffered several days of some quite nasty bugs.

Right now Ubuntu 12.04 is quite polished, but there are a few bugs yet, the ones I suffer daily are: Minitube crashes all the time, Simple Scan also crashes a lot.

All the other important bugs seen to have been fixed.

I specially like how faster is LibreOffice now. The interface with the Radiance theme looks awesome. I am liking a lot 12.04.

Alex

I generally wait until the release is at least one month old, then I do a dist-upgrade. I know, as tommcd has pointed out, that most will recommend a clean install each time, but I originally installed Intrepid (8.10) on this laptop and have done dist-upgrades all the way to 12.04 and have never had an issue. Occassionally, a particular piece of software will not work well with new upgrades, but in those cases I simply upgrade them or uninstall them and look for an alternative. I also have a number of third party repos (medibunty, kdenlive, Cinelerra, etc.) and they all get disabled for each upgrade and I re-enable them after the upgrade. I am not recommending this route for everyone, but it has worked well for me all along. I use ony LTS releases on my desktop, and will shortly be upgrading to 12.04 on that.

Just a thought.

Bob

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ditto on #1. On #2 I've found to be true. Some of those 3rd party "tweaks" have been causing problems for me. I have removed all of them.

I get error messages occasionally, and they inform me of a "crash", but 12.04 (Unity and Xubuntu) keeps on ticking! Pretty happy with all the flavors of 12.04 LTS.

To be fair, I should state that many people do use those PPA repos without issues. As you have experienced though, there are some which may cause dependency issues with APT and other problems. There is no special skill or standards required to create a PPA repo. Anyone can do it. So the quality of the packages and the degree to which they are maintained can vary widely. So you have to be careful with any third party repository.
Many people seem to think that those PPAs are supported or at least sanctioned by the Ubuntu developers, which is clearly not true.

So...one last thing...anytime I've installed Ubuntu (being 10.10 and 11.10) I always checked off "install third party software" and never had an issue...this time I didn't as I was told and now my music doesn't seem to play, nor my videos, nor Youtube videos...I don't know what else...should I put the live cd in and re-install it with the third party software? Since Ubuntu is only taking up 20gb of my hard drive that's all I'd have to replace right? (provided that's even the way to fix this.)

I never had any problems when I upgraded from the upgrade manager to 12.04. 12.04 has been pretty good for me. That is not to say your experience might be different. I say go ahead and upgrade if you are wanting to do so. Things should be ok at this point.

Try just installing the ubuntu-restricted-extras and the ubuntu-restricted-addons packages. Those should give you just about everything you need:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/u...tricted-addons
http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/u...tricted-extras
You can also add the medibuntu repos for the Windows codecs (w32codecs for 32bit Ubuntu and w64codecs for 64bit Ubuntu). You can also get libdvdcss2 for playing encrypted DVDs from medibuntu:
http://medibuntu.org/repository.php
Note: The Ubuntu repos are running very slow as of this writing; so you may have trouble installing these packages at this time. There is a recent thread about this here:http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...m-down-945896/