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Ubuntu murdered by impatient and distracted user

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On my main laptop at home, I have long been running Windows 7 (which it came with), and using a program called wubi to dual boot into Ubuntu 12.04 (which means I had to decide when I turned on the computer whether I wanted to run Windows or Linux, and usually picked Linux). Ubuntu has worked pretty well for me. But I saw that it had come out with another Long Term Release, 14.04. So while I was doing other things, I said, sure, let's upgrade.

As is so often the case when things go wrong, it was almost certainly my own fault. I'm not sure that I had a fully updated system before I started. I failed to back up a couple of files. I didn't read screens all the way through. I am, in fact, an idiot.

The upgrade went through, but I didn't have menus at the top of the screen. That's a problem that the Internet has located, and several solutions were offered. I tried a couple of them, and it's possible I screwed that up, too, just by being impatient. Bottom line: I totally borked my Ubuntu installation.

Then I spent a little while finding out about a program that lets you peek inside a wubi installation and extract some files. So it wasn't a total loss. But I wound up totally uninstalling Ubuntu. So far, I haven't reinstalled it, either. Why?

There are two reasons:

  1. I have a lot of computing devices, and all of them take a lot of time to keep up to date. There are always software patches and new versions. On this one laptop, I was updating two operating systems. It got annoying.
  2. It turns out that it doesn't much matter which operating system I use. I've tried to narrow things down to the same handful of programs that are on all of them. LibreOffice, Chrome, Notecase Pro. Anymore, almost all of my work is there, in the cloud.
And although Microsoft still irritates me, Windows 7 is ok. I haven't figured out why it doesn't want to print to my wifi printer - but I can even do that through Chrome. The computer is supposed to be my tool, not the other way around.

Of course, my phone and my tablet are still Android based, which is a flavor of Linux. But for now, I'll stick with the one OS on my laptop. Sheesh.
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