I couldn’t wait any longer so I did a 100% new install of Intrepid yesterday. For the past couple years I have upgraded to the new release by just installing it while preserving my /home. The upgrade tool never worked well for me and a new install only took 30 minutes so once I learned about keeping /home on a separate partition I’ve always done it that way.

However, I’ve read a few comments that caused me to question whether reusing all my settings and such with each new release was really a good idea. I kind of assumed that each new install would write new hidden files as necessary but I really don’t know for sure (can anyone enlighten me?). Therefore, I decided that is was time for an entirely new install. It takes a lot of faith to wipe out 200GB of data. I backed it all up - twice, but it was still kind of unnerving. However, I’m happy to report that my new Intrepid desktop is running beautifully and all my data survived, I hope.

Impressions: