I did it again. Upgrade Ubuntu right after a release despite all the problems I had in the past. But this time, after almost four weeks of working with Ubuntu 12.10 on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE, I'm confident that things are looking up again.

My biggest problem with 12.04 (and several older releases) was broken hibernate and suspend support. The other glitches I could live with, but that was the reason I rarely used my netbook anymore. While suspend worked right out of the box, hibernate needed a bit of extra work because it has been removed from the system menu several releases ago. Fortunately, there's decent documentation on how to do that.

One thing I absolutely don't like about the release is a new feature in Unity's Dash that displays search results from Amazon whenever you type a query. This is a really serious breach of privacy (here's the EFF's take on it), so I disabled this right away by uninstalling the package:

sudo dpkg --purge unity-lens-shopping

Note that this required a restart of the desktop environment to take effect. There's also the option of disabling online search results via the menu via System Settings > Privacy > Include online search results. I get it that they need to earn money, but if they don't ask for my permission then I'll opt out by principle.

Like in previous releases, I tried Gnome 3 for a bit. It feels better now, but on my netbook I like Unity better. It has been designed with netbooks in mind, so no surprise there.