My commitment to bleeding-edgery leads to one weird consequence. When I upgrade Ubuntu to an alpha version (I’m running 10.10 now), there’s about an hour of readjusting configurations and dealing with obsoleted packages, then things get back to pretty stable. Except that until nearly the final release, gnome-settings-daemon crashes on me once or twice a day. I don’t know what’s going on in there that could be so unstable during the development phase of a distribution… it sounds like it’s basically a little client-server database for key-value trees. Thought that problem was already solved.
Anyway, it’s easy enough to <Alt -F2> gnome-set <ret>, and I’ve never lost any work or had an episode of Futurama ruined or anything…