Life on the Bleeding Edge: Installer Fails in Fedora and Ubuntu

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the only Linux distros that are truly suitable for every day, no muss, no fuss use are the ones that aren't trying to satisfy the geek hobbyists who always want the latest and greatest no matter what. I've actually had little trouble at all with Ubuntu 9.10 but it's the first release I've been able to say that about in a long time. The distros with long term support who stay away from the cutting edge (Red Hat/CentOS/Oracle/Scientific Linux and Ubuntu LTS) seem to be the ones that really just work. The ones with a one year release cycle (i.e.: SUSE and Pardus) also seem to have less bugs and issues. I'm increasingly convinced that any distro with a six month release cycle will have lots of bugs and issues more often than not.

Unfortunately, you're right.

And I suppose even the Ubuntu LTS needs a few months or so to "settle" before it enters "just work" status.

In my case, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS did work, but 9.04 was better after I was able to quickly deal with a few post-install problems. For whatever reason, wireless networking in 8.10/9.04 was better.

And Intel video supposedly got better in 9.10 (though I didn't have any trouble with it that I couldn't solve in 9.04).

I don't know if PPAs are the solution in Ubuntu to getting those few new packages one needs, or backports, along with sticking to what seems to work distro-wise.

I sure did a lot of complaining about all the things I've had to fix over the past few months.

Suse and Pardus -- They're starting to sound pretty good, although I could just stay with Ubuntu 9.10 for the next year.

And my Debian Lenny laptop is at the ready. Now that I finally figured out that I needed to add the rt73 drivers for my Ralink-chipset WiFi adapter, I should see if it's more stable running the NIC than Ubuntu 8.04 (with its semi-regular crashes) was.

My recent upgrades, were both blog-driven (I need stuff to write about) and app-driven — I did want Firefox 3.5 (hence 9.10), and I have the occasional but regular need to open those dreaded .docx MS files, and OO 3.1 does a nice job with that.