<div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 1, 2008 5:16 AM, Pär Lidén <<a href="mailto:par.liden@gmail.com">par.liden@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Today, the non-LTS releases could be sometimes quite unstable (sometimes very stable, it seems to be a little bit of a lottery...). I've had myself some problems after upgrading to Gutsy, and from reading the forums, I'm not alone. One user called Gutsy the buggiest Ubuntu ever. So I would not dare to recommend any non-geek to install any other release than an LTS. But as the LTS might contain (after time) so outdated software, it would not be very compelling. However, I have some modifications to Evans suggestion. I think that applications should not be upgraded if their resource usage is significantly higher than in the original release. I would also like this distribution to contain updates for hardware support. I don't think my dad would be happy if he had bought a new scanner/dvd-burner/graphics card/whatever, and if he wants to use it with the Ubuntu system I might have installed for him, he has to upgrade to a new, potentially buggy distribution. I know that it is very difficult to update hardware support and at the same time keep things stable with the current kernel development release model, but hey, you are allowed to state your wishes, aren't you? ;-) </blockquote></div> Hey, there's such a thing as "too stable." Debian Stable is so stable it crashes when it encounters my laptop's hardware (too new..a year old when the last Stable release happened). Ubuntu, thankfully, doesn't..usually...as long as it's Feisty. Feisty was the only stable release I've come across, and I had to compile drivers for my card reader myself (regression from Edgy, fixed in a kernel update a few weeks after Feisty's release). Dapper's instability (crashing, no sound on some boots, sky2 dying) made me go to Edgy, and its instability (same) made me upgrade to Feisty. Feisty still had sky2 issues, but it was the most stable Ubuntu release I've come across. I think we all know about Gutsy's OOo crashing bug where the entire system would go down if OOo didn't like your theme (there were about 100 dups of it on Launchpad...yeesh). I've got another bug that means I often have to reboot up to 4 times to get GNOME to load, but I'm experimenting to see if reinstalling some gnome libraries will fix it--it could just be some corruption in my system (I installed Edgy using a broken CD drive and upgraded because Feisty couldn't be installed with a broken drive and the drive was dead by Gutsy's release). The long time (nearly a full minute!) between login screen and a working GNOME desktop (what does it do when it's solid brown anyway? and why does it feel like XP?) is also a big regression from Feisty. I still wouldn't call Gutsy the most unstable release I've used though. That was Dapper, simply by virtue of being released right around the same time my laptop was made. It didn't have time to get proper hardware support for it. It would still be completely unusable for me, a year and a half later (when there has been plenty of time), because there are no hardware updates available for it, short of compiling a vanilla kernel (and what "normal user" is going to do that?). We have LRM for adding support for restricted hardware. Couldn't there be a LUM (linux-updated-modules) compiled for LTS to add support for newer hardware? -- Mackenzie Morgan Linux User #432169 ACM Member #3445683 <a href="http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com">http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com</a> <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff apt-get moo