When Update Manager told me the upgrade to 13.04 was available, I held my breath and pressed OK.  My experience with updates in every OS has been less than stellar, so I fully expected to run it, get disgusted and wipe everything and rebuild from scratch.  But, it went fine.  

I am not able to detect any noticeable differences between 12.10 and 13.04.  There are a few, but nothing awe inspiring.  Here’s what I see:

Nautilus is Gone

Nautilus has been replaced with an app called “Files”.  Af first I was really upset.  Nautilus had a built-in split screen (F3) thing I used all the time for comparing and moving files and now it was gone.  However, after using Files for a while, I have adapted and moved on.  The ‘Move to’ and ‘Copy to’ options work real well, bringing up a new window where I can select the destination folder easily.  In many ways, it’s more intuitive than the way I was doing it.

Ubuntu One has a new icon

I use InSync, Dropbox and Ubuntu One for cloud storage.  So now there are three icons in my menu bar, the ‘antenna i ‘ , the ‘open box’, and a cloud.  The cloud is Ubuntu One.

More Integration with Menu Bar

It seems more programs are more tightly integrated with the Menu Bar.  For example, Liferea (my RSS coagulator) shows unread article counts under the Media icon (envelope).

Under the Hood

I’m sure there are many more improvements that I cannot directly see.  I read the Nouveau video driver is improved.  I do know that the overall experience of using Ubuntu 13.04 is smoother than ever.  Things just seem to work, and I like that.

I’ve been working with Draftsight for quite a while now.  I’m still excited about it.  It does a great job of allowing me to work alongside Autocad users, often without them even knowing.  

Because the software is free, I’ve been slow to compain about the occasional glitch or crash.  I save everything frequently and often, so recovery is usually as easy as restarting the program.

I was, however, starting to get a little irritated with Draftsight because it would crash quite often, usually just as I was about to save changes.  I finally started to notice a pattern, and today I moved the file I was working on out of the Dropbox folder and did all my editing on a purely local drive.  Draftsight only crashed once in eight hours.  That’s a significant reduction.  I would easily have seen as many as twenty crashes in the same time-frame before.

So, it appears that Draftsight does not like working on files stored under the Dropbox folder hierarchy.  

Just thought I’d pass that along.