I too had problems upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04. The platform is a new (6 months old) Dell laptop that was running Ubuntu 10.10. That was my first experience with Ubuntu although I'm an old Unix guru from WAY back and have lots of experience with RedHat/Fedora.

I upgraded from the update manager when it prompted me to upgrade to 11.04 and let it run while I was doing other things. Everything seemed to load and install cleanly but when it was done, my touchpad was non-functional. I tried using the keyboard button that toggles it on/off several times with no effect so after muttering some words that I won't bother to print here, I went searching for a USB mouse that I could plug in to get access to the system. After finding one and plugging it in I was able to use the system but I still could not figure out what was wrong with the touchpad. I searched for updated drivers and found none (Dell doesn't even know how to spell Linux on their support site!). After fighting with the Unity desktop for hours I finally got into the touchpad configuration program and it looked fine. Out of desperation, I disabled the touchpad, exited the program, fired it up again, enabled the touchpad, and voila! The touchpad worked. I spent a total of several hours getting over that little glitch.

Now on to the Unity desktop...

I'm an old Mac user (from a while ago) so I'm somewhat familiar with the interface that they are trying to present but that said, I am having a terrible time finding things like my recent documents and applications (Yes, I know there is a button with those labels but my docs/apps don't seem to be in there!). The system settings being somewhat hidden in the icon at the far right of the menu bar was completely strange to me. Why would they try to hide that? The only way I found that was by searching the web. Is there any good intro to Unity anywhere?

I'm giving Unity a try at Jack Wallen's recommendation and I hope I can get over the initial hurtles before I get too frustrated and go back to my command line windows.

One very annoying thing that I have not yet figured out is how to configure the workspaces. I have not found any configuration options GUI for this yet and I'm getting more and more annoyed with this. I'm used to using a 1x8 workspace setup and the 2x2 default setup doesn't cut it for me. If anyone out there can help, I'd be VERY appreciative. I found an online blurb about manually editing the configuration settings which I tried but it was already set to my previous values of 1x8 so Unity is obviously using a different set of configuration settings.