Five years old Ubuntu system - dist-upgrades always went fine, however some tasks remain

Question

I have a PC with a current Ubuntu distribution installed. I've upgraded many times since 5.10.

It always went well, however some tools or features were kind of left behind in a unsatisfactory state:

1. GRUB to GRUB2 - is it an really necessary to switch the boot loader some time to GRUB2. Upgrading this scares me a bit.

2. I still have ext3 devices - is it worth upgrading to ext4? should I wait for btrfs?

3. Hibernation and suspend - it only worked in 5.10, since 6.04 it was messed up. Should I really care? Any chance to repair this myself? Simply by cleanup or hacking config files. It is a desktop PC after all. So energy saving functionality is not really needed.

4. I am using VMware Workstation 6.5 and the latest kernel that supports it is 2.6.32. This is my default kernel now, ignoring 2.6.35. Am I missing anything important in the new kernel now?

Answer 1

I know this is what you may have already Google'd and found on your own, but here is my opinion, for what it's worth.

Grub v Grub2 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275

I've had some older systems I upgraded and some fresh installs. Grub2 was developed with new technology in mind, so it performs the same function slightly faster and more efficient and will likely work better with newer machines, but you're not as risk if Grub is working for you as is. If you're doing a fresh installation, it's kind of a no brainer to go with what is provided.

On ext3 v ext4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

ext4 gives you the capability to use high capacity storage devices and better performance based on how it organizes data, so if you're using application with lots of read/writes like a website that performs a search or some other transaction, you may have some benefits there. But, if you have less than a terabyte of storage and you're just you on the desktop in normal usage patterns, I would say there isn't a huge need for you to upgrade and risk losing anything (data or hardware).

On the kernel (http://www.h-online.com/open/features/What-s-new-in-Linux-2-6-36-1103009.html), I know there are some software packages that are slow to upgrade and aren't getting along with the latest version. You are getting additional support for hardware that was not available previously, so if you've got nVidia it'll likely improve what you're seeing.

So, if you're system is running sufficient for what you're using it for, then go for it. The performance increase you would see by upgrading I believe would be minimal, at least for the hassle of upgrading and troubleshooting. BUT if you go with a fresh installation, it would be a hard sell to me to do anything other than the latest offerings.