My Blackbeauty is getting NATTYer and giving me a hard time

As soon as I heard that Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu's latest distro was to be launched on April 28th, 2011, I was keenly waiting for the same. I jokingly asked an expert (@shekharg) if he could guess why I was waiting for April 28th. I thought it would be a piece of cake for him but he could not guess it. I was not sad but happier because he also added that he likes to work with OSs/ tools/ gadgets that have bugs. He is not interested in Linux anymore because everything works. I wonder what OS is he working with these days ;)

But my journey from 10.10 to 11.04 was not as smooth as I had expected (or experienced with past upgrades).

1. I first tried upgrading via the 'update manager'. It took over 3 hours but failed with some error message.
2. Then I started searching for an 'alternate CD image'. In past, alternate CD is what I used for upgrading via CD media. Surprisingly I could not find the latest release (I am sure it must be there somewhere.... but the point is that I could  not find it)
3. With no other option I used the standard desktop CD image (for 64 bit machines) for installation.
4. Thanks to past expert advice from (@kbhargava) I have always kept the /home directory on a separate partition. So, it was easy for me to do a fresh install without losing my data (or even fear of loosing my data)
5. Unity desktop environment is a big difference in 11.04. As a result, my old user profile was not working smoothly enough. In past, every upgrade was so smooth that I was back to a fully functional machine with all settings/ preferences preserved within 2 hours.
6. I finally had to create a new user profile and shift the data manually. This meant that I would not be able to preserve settings/ preferences/ passwords etc.

Overall, the upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04 (for me) has not been as smooth as past upgrades. I am also not sure if unity desktop environment is far better but it is certainly fresh. I did notice one mac-like feature (Menu for every app window is on the top bar as on macs). But I am happy using this latest version of Ubuntu :))