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When I first moved from Debian to Ubuntu last year, I upgraded in place -- I simply backed up my computer onto a USB drive, edited my /etc/apt/sources.list to comment out the Debian repositories and add the Ubuntu ones, then crossed my fingers and did a dist-upgrade. It worked pretty well, though I had to use dpkg manually on a couple of minor packages to sort out dependency confusion. That's obviously not an approach suitable for a brand-new Linux user, of course. A while after that, my laptop hard drive had a mechanical failure, so I installed Ubuntu from scratch on a clean drive.



WiFi support depends to a large extent on the card you're using. For some of them, you have to install a wrapper package (ndis-wrapper??) and use a binary Windows driver, which is clearly not a user-friendly option. Then again, it took two of my extended family members weeks to get WiFi working with simple WEP encryption on their Mac iBooks (one on Tiger and one on Panther; one with a LinkSys router and one with a DLink. They had to give on on WPA) -- sadly, Windows seems to be the only platform that makes WiFi easy, probably because the Windows drivers get the most attention from the hardware manufacturers.@en