Ubuntu 9.04 more stable than 8.04 on my particular rig

I'm a big proponent of the long-term-release concept in operating systems because I think both the enterprise and the home user doesn't want things breaking and should have the option of sticking with a particular distribution longer than 6 or 12 months.

And I stuck with the current long-term release of Ubuntu — 8.04 — for well over a year because it worked fairly well with the particular hardware I'm using.

But often a new release can clear up problems and be more stable than the perceived "stable" release.

That seems to be the case with my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop and Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter.

While it worked great in OpenBSD 4.4 and worked OK in various Linux distributions with newish kernels, I was having intermittent crashes in Ubuntu while using the adapter. I'd be using the laptop with the CWD-854 for a couple of hours and, without warning, the screen would freeze and nothing short of a hard restart would bring it back.

Well, I finally decided to upgrade to 9.04 (on the cusp of 9.10's release, if you hadn't noticed). I'll have a review in the near future. (Bet everyone can't wait for my 9.04 review when 9.10 is almost here, right?)

The upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 and then 9.04 took about six hours, accounting for both download and install time.

The changes to NetworkManager between 8.04 and 8.10 (the app looks and works much unlike it's predecessor) threw me for awhile, and I've finally got a fair handle on how to manage both wired and wireless networking.

One bonus I've been enjoying for the past few days is greater stability when using the Cnet CWD-854 WiFi adapter. It runs great, has a strong connection to my router, and I haven't had a crash of any kind since I made the upgrade to 9.04.

So on my particular rig, Ubuntu 9.04 is looking pretty darn stable next to 8.04, which was no slouch in the stability department (after solving problems along the way with Pidgin and Flash).

What does this mean? As usual, I'll try to wait a while before upgrading to 9.10 because I'm enjoying use of such a good, working system, and I'd rather avoid the rush (and the overworked mirrors). And we're only six months away from the next Ubuntu LTS, 10.04 ...