Ubuntu upgrade from 17.04 to 17.10

[fox]

I tried this today using an installation on an external drive. The upgrade was uneventful for the most part. Because I had been using a combination of Unity and Gnome with a bunch of extensions, I had to play around a bit to get my desktop back to what I had. Actually, with Unity, I couldn't because, although it still worked, the tweaks like changed icons wouldn't work from Unity Tweak Tool. With Gnome, I got more or less my old settings as default, but certain extensions there didn't work either. I had to play around a bit to get the default Gnome desktop of Ubuntu 17.10 working, but it did and it is nice. Fortunately the top icons I needed (dropbox, insync) showed up and worked on the top bar without the topicons plus extension. There is an update to that extension, but installing it and running it on the Ubuntu theme took away the dropbox icon. Turning off topicons plus and rebooting brought it back.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 17.10 stopped insync from working initially. You have to install sni-qt (in the Ubuntu repository) to get it working.

One other easily solvable problem was that the version of SimpleNote I had installed in 17.04 wouldn't work in 17.10. However, the snap version of SimpleNote does work. Good thing; I've come to depend on it.

[Jason]

Glad it worked for out for you, Mike, well, at least mostly. SimpleNote looks interesting. I hadn't seen it before. I've been steadily working on my Java course and thinking I need a better app for taking notes. Had been using Xed in Cinnamon Mate which is super basic but recently migrated to using Notepadqq which is a Notepad++ clone for Linux because of the feature where it restores the files you last had open. But starting to realize that plain text doesn't leave a lot of room for emphasis. I'm going to take a look at SimpleNote.

[fox]

I think you'll like Simplenote. It's attractive, fast and cross platform. I can see my notes on Linux, android, Mac, iOS and Windows.

[Jason]

Created an account and downloaded the Linux version. Looks elegant.

Only criticism thus far is that you have to choose Export to save your notes, otherwise they're saved in the cloud. It's not that I mind the cloud (I use InSync with Google Drive for backup), it's that I'd rather have all my date on GDrive rather than their own cloud server. Because if they disappear overnight so does your information. However, I just noted that the company behind them is Automattic, Inc. They're most known for making WordPress.com in 2005 and a lot of other products since then. So, I don't think they will disappear without fair warning.

[fox]

Just a quick update. Today I upgraded a different 17.04 installation, and it was even smoother than that of my previous try when 17.10 first came out. This time Simplenote worked out of the box, even before I updated it to the present version (1.10), and the snap wasn't needed. Insync worked ok without doing anything special. Dropbox didn't. I had to update it and then run "dropbox start" to get it working and its icon showing up on the unity menubar.