Decided to do a fresh 10.10 install to check it out. I use RAID so my installs are from the alternate cd's rather than the live cd. Here's my notes thus far;
1. grub-pc has regressed to it's previous almost unusable state: Turns out the grub on 10.10 won't detect almost anything other than it's own install-host. In fact, it left me without a usable computer unless I want to use 10.10. It did notice and setup Linux Mint 9 KDE on one partition, but wouldn't boot to it even though I booted to it this morning from 10.04. Manually editing grub.cfg didn't help either. Trying to run grub-install from the live cd 10.04 didn't work because RAID (which I install to) isn't supported by the livecd kernel - and yes I installed mdadm to the live environment and it was unable to assemble my RAID devices. Finally ended up doing a new 10.04 (alt cd) install to another partition and now I'm booting back to my previous 10.04. That's 1 hour wasted.
2. Hard drive detection is bonkers: When I did the initial install, I noticed during partitioning setup the my hard drives were listed as sda,sde,sdf,sdg rather than sda,sdb... as before. There were no devices present occupying sdb, sdc, sdd. This did not prevent the install from occurring, but was a bit disconcerting. The mis-labeling carried over to the install environment.
3. Wine went nuts too: The main reason I decided to do the 10.10 install in the first place was because wine and 10.04 will no longer let my Warcraft III game play. I didn't want to move back to 9.10 where it worked so I thought I'd give 10.10 a shot. Not only did Warcraft not play, but wine took over http: and tried to launch a "wine browser" when I clicked on a link. Actually, it tried to launch a "wine browser" (whatever that is) once every half-second or so until my task bar looked like it was solid black and I rebooted. To be fair, it's unlikely this is Meerkat's fault but worth reporting.
Granted, my setup is a bit unusual, but it's far from exotic. Using RAID0 and having more than one hard drive seems to be too much for the current iteration of Meerkat. Which is saddening because 9.04, 9.10, and 10.04 have had no problems like the above on this system. Typical growing pains I suppose. I'll be waiting quite awhile before I attempt this again.
On the upside - for the 10 minutes I spent using 10.10, it looked great visually and seemed snappy. I guess that would be KDE4.5.1 over 4.4.5 I'm using with 10.04.
EDIT: and kpackagekit was 1000% improved, but knetworkmanager is still total crap.
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