For my purposes here, however, I will speak only of the VGA controller on my beater laptop. This glorified Dell brand doorstop's video controller is an Nvidia G72M Quadro NVS 110M GeForce Go 7300 and it doesn't much like the upgrade. In fact, upon reboot after installation, if you are using this card then your desktop will be disappeared when you attempt to log back into the GUI. Sure, you can still hit a CTRL + F1 and login at the non-shell prompt, but that's about it. Your desktop is, for all intents and purposes, completely and utterly nuked. Don't bother searching for help on AskUbuntu because the community doesn't really have a solution. While there are many suggestions to reenable the GUI, not all of them work for everyone. Case in point: Yours truly.
So after my desktop was removed by the 14.04.02 upgrade, I had to make a decision. Go round and round and round with trial and error suggestions, spending hours upon hours trying to get back the Unity desktop or just bite the bullet and reinstall the OS. Shades of Microsoft Windows here, folks. Is it just me or is Ubuntu becoming more and more like MS? As evidenced by its ever increasing, voracious appetite for RAM, and now, an upgrade to the LTS version screws up the GUI so badly it necessitates an OS reinstall, I think the writing on the wall is slowly becoming visible. Not good, people. Not good at all. If this shit keeps up, I smell an Ubuntu partition wiping in my triple boot laptop's future.
For those of you still reading and not sure whether the 14.04.02 upgrade will farck up your system, the following may be helpful. It is a screencap of the window that appears upon a system update.
If you are unsure as to whether the upgrade will adversely affect your system irrevocably, you will, of course, want to avoid clicking on partial upgrade. But to move forward with updates to the rest of the system, just click continue. This action will result in asking for authentication and the usual list of software updates to download and install. Thereafter, you will want to go into settings and remove the check for updates to the OS else you will be perpetually nagged by the Not all updates can be installed screen.
In closing, please note here that if your system is using the generic Linux Nouveau video driver, then you are probably safe and the 14.04.02 upgrade probably won't affect you, however, I include this blurb only as a suggestion. The smart thing to do would be to download and burn to a disc the 14.04.02 upgrade and attempt to run it as live CD on your system to see if your video card will even render the demo. If it does not, then you know it will nuke your desktop.
OTOH, if you read this entry and are confident your VGA controller will not be affected by the upgrade, and it turns out that it does in fact, nuke your system, don't come bitchin' to me about it. I make absolutely no guarantees. In fact, if your GUI does crap out upon installing the upgrade then you should contact Canonical and let them know that 14.04.02 is an epic FAIL because that seems to be the general consensus on AskUbuntu in not so many words. Actually, the word "fail" is not used because the thought police on aforementioned website do not permit words to be published that can even be remotely construed to be critical of Ubuntu.
The sun is always shining in AskUbuntu land courtesy of the heavy handed moderators who patrol the site and immediately remove anything anyone has written that can be interpreted as criticism whether constructive or not. I guess that's one way to ensure that the little people don't bad mouth the distro that billionaire Shuttleworth so desperately wants to monetize even having resorted to including a potential security hole enabled by default in the 14.04 LTS version debut. Now to be accurate, this fiasco has since been addressed by Canonical, however, it was not until much Sturm und Drang generated by this site that it even acknowledged there was a problem with sending user searches to Amazon without knowledge or consent. Personally, I think it's only a matter of time before Ubuntu becomes the OS to avoid because its source code has been completely compromised the better to add another dozen digits to Shuttleworth's bank account.
By the way, this same update to Linux Mint Maya 13 does not nuke the desktop, but then, it would not since Mint does not use Unity (which seems to be becoming a problem child.) I mention it here because Mint and Ubuntu are both based on Debian and download updates from the same repositories.
