Ubuntu 12.04 upgrade experiences?

[Michael Butash]

   Just curious, has anyone had a *good* experience upgrading to 12.04 
ubuntu yet?  Has anyone had a *good* upgrade on ubuntu in somewhat 
recent memory?

   I'd upgraded to 12.04 a few weeks ago now, and have literally seen it 
go from "ok with relics of brokenness" to "almost unusable" within a few 
weeks and little fathomable explanation.  The distro built thunderbird 
crashes constantly (replaced with mozilla build for stability), 
compiz/unity half-assed worked for a while, out of nowhere I can't even 
get unity to launch (which is almost a plus in itself).  Neither Gnome3 
or Cinnamon work in it, Banshee/Rhythembox both are fairly unstable, AWN 
task manager won't work with most applets (including the default task 
manager), cairo is quirky as all getout, and there STILL ISN'T A REAL 
SCREENSAVER BY DEFAULT!.  I'm still irked libreoffice is forced upon me 
and cant render M$ office xml files by default (that anyone but a linux 
user has by default now), and it isn't getting any easier to install 
openoffice to replace it.  Most annoying is luks no longer accepts input 
from my logitech wireless keyboard, forcing me upon reboot (which is 
every other day since upgrade) to have to jack in a wired keyboard and 
keep it at my desk for when ubuntu poops itself.

   I'm at something of a crossroads with ubuntu, and just wondering if 
I'm alone.  Mint is immature, I haven't liked RH-based distro's before, 
but leaning toward them now, and then there's the "just use win7 as a 
windows manager" as I did for most of my windows-based life prior to 
linux.  Ubuntu's turned into an abortion for me, consistently eventually 
hozing up a system despite whatever care I give to not agitate it. 
Upgrades have typically been terrible experiences, usually ending up 
installing clean to fix nasty relics of the upgrade, which begs then 
"why bother to make an install?"

   Literally crappy windows 95 "upgrades" come to mind, where it'll 
always turn it into some unusable pile upon completion - which is about 
what I'm left with after update-manager -d anymore.  It doesn't matter 
whether it's in alpha or final, the results are almost always the same 
beyond 8.04 for me.

   Worst is every time something crashes ugly and I try to "send a 
report" it just finds an arbitrary upgrade necessary as an excuse not to 
bother, that would have me restart every 6 hours.  I can't even easily 
try and contribute anything to help!

   Next time I have to flatten this, I'm going to have to go back to 
square one to find a new distro - I just can't trust ubuntu to work 
adequately for my needs anymore out of box or sustainable over time. 
Any they want to use it in embedded applications?

-mb