Not sure what to do about this one, the main draw for upgrading is the fact gimp 2.8 will be available but the downside is the release isn't supported long term.

I know there are ways to get 2.8 running on my current version of ubuntu 12.04 but most threads I've read reckon its best to steer clear of the packages as they can normally be quite buggy and wait until it comes to the software centre.

what to do?

There's a good review at Linux User UK.
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/ubu ... super-test

or check
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu

Hi he4rty,
If you don't mind spending some time on an install take a look at Gentoo http://www.gentoo.org/
It teaches you a lot about Linux.
All software is compiled on your box,which means it'll be tailor made for your hardware.
(Some large packages like libreoffice and firefox are also available in binary form)
There's quite a steep learning curve but the reward is great.
And you don't have to upgrade the whole install.
In Gentoo this is done gradually when new packages become available.
I have used many distro's until in December 2003 I discovered Gentoo,never used another since then.
To install you need a "live" cd or USB stick with Linux on it.
I use http://www.sysresccd.org/Download it's based on Gentoo and you can follow the handbook verbatim.
Gerard.

I thought about updating my Pangolin (64-bit) to a Quetzal (like I said, thought about it. lol), but Pangolin is an LTS so thinking I will wait until the release after Quetzal (Ringtail) to take the plunge. As a side note, I've had pretty much zero success updating previous versions of Ubuntu to the next version (only succeeded once (and the update was painfully slow; like hours); others crashed the OS and I've been toying with Ubuntu VMs since Feisty); best to download the DVD (in my case, the image) and re-installing the whole shebang from scratch (hence my no desire stance at doing it now; lol). Either approach, you should back all your data up to an external device prior.

Thanks for the response and links, to be honest I don't think I'll be trying Gentoo, as I don't really have the time or the inclination to learn all that at the moment.

Well all data backed up, so I think I'm going to go for it, If you don't see me for a few days then its all gone horribly wrong.

In Ubuntu versions that achieve better stability are the LTS.
If you want to have the best stability, should stay in 12.04.
If you want to have the possibility to test the most resent versions of all programs, you updated to 12.10.
My recommendation, if you really have no reason to upgrade, do not do that.

Edit:
You uninstall your Gimp 2.6 and all packages related to Gimp on Ubuntu 12.04. Then add the following PPA to Ubuntu 12.04:
https://launchpad.net/~otto-kesselgulasch/+archive/gimp

Then install gimp:

I would recommend staying with 12.04. 12.10 has the Amazon thing which I'm hoping they'll get rid of by the next LTS release, because if they don't I'll have to change to another distro. Yes you can turn it off but I don't think anyone should encourage this kind of behaviour from Canonical. At the very least it should be turned off by default.

You can easily get GIMP 2.8 by compiling it yourself. There are step-by-step guides for doing this and it's really quite simple, just follow instructions and type them in them terminal. Like baking a cake it is.

how do you update gmic in 12.10?

Just replace the GMIC binary in the plug-ins folder and ensure the executable bit is set.

The problem with the long term support distros is that they don't evolve and don't even get things patched unless it's a security risk. so if you want to move to Gimp 2.10/3 someday you'll have to change distros anyway. Long-term is OK only if you don't want to upgrade any of your software.

That's not completely true. There's backports. A lot of the updates of 12.10 are available for 12.04 as backports. As for software, no one forces you to stick to the official repos. If you want to run GIMP 2.10 you can compile it yourself, or just install a package from a 3rd-party repository or get it otherwise.

On the other hand you're right in one regard, which is that the kernel is frozen in the LTS version, so you won't get to benefit from the latest kernel features. But that's not a totally negative thing either - just a while ago, the newer kernels (from 3.4 and up) got a nasty ext4 bug that caused some corrupted data. The older kernels weren't affected - so users of 12.10 could get affected by it, while 12.04 users were safe.

Backports have their limits because they can cause a dependency avalanche (this is the case with Gimp 2.8). The purpose of distros is that you know that everything is working together. Upgrading one of your packages is often OK, but when it requires upgrades to core stuff like Glib you take the risk to create problems with other software.

OK, so I did download and try out 12.10 but it seemed very sluggish on my computer, so with everything backed up decided to revert back to 12.04

Uninstalled Gimp and tryed to upload gimp 2.8 using the instructions on page 1 of this thread and it just load back to gimp 2.6???

Decided that maybe an uninstall wasn't completely removing everything so searched out Ubuntu Tweaks so I could run the Janitor and clean the system and try again.

Ubuntu Tweaks has upgraded to 0.8 and now includeds it own little app centre and this little app centre includes Gimp 2.8, so cleaned system one click on the icon in the app centre and gimp 2.8 is now loaded and my computer seems happier again.

Huh? I'm running 2.8 on 12.04 without any problems whatsoever. Haven't seen any conflicts or avalanches. I compiled it myself and installed with checkinstall so that I can easily remove it with the package manager if I need to recompile when an update comes.

In addition to that, I also run Krita 2.5, latest version of Inkscape, both Unity and Mate desktops... + lots of other stuff. And Krita depends on a lot of the KDE libs so I basically have almost 3 DE:s installed...

In my experience, most of the time you can get everything working as long as you're careful and don't mess with things you don't know (or at least make backups if you do... luckily I just got a second HD (external on USB) which I can use to backup all my stuff so I don't need to worry if I manage to mess up my system).