On 6/14/2011 10:48 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Non-LTS are virtually the same as Fedora releases; experimental releases. Even some LTS releases get pushed out the door with major bugs in various packages. The only plus is that it is possible to do major-rev upgrades provided that you do not use third-party repos.
Every Ubuntu release has been fraught with the screams of victims who had their dist-upgrade blow up in their face whether LTS or non-LTS release. Okay, I personally have not had major problems, but it sure does not inspire confidence.
Odd you should mention it - a friend on a techie mailing list just tried to set up dual-boot XP w/ ubuntu, and had all *kinds* of grief, dunno if she just restored XP. Wouldn't recognize her USB keyboard, didn't get the graphics card and monitor right (which does surprise me), and she had fun trying to find in which submenu the X settings were (applications, not system!).
I suppose there is hardware that nothing but pre-installed windows will recognize.... But I happen to have a dual-boot XP/Ubuntu laptop where I can run the ubuntu session either natively or under VMware player and it just pops up a dialog asking if I want to run in low-res or reconfigure X (which it does automatically) when I switch between the modes and it sees different hardware. And it detects a USB keyboard just fine, whether hot plugged or present at boot time. So, I don't think your friend's experience is typical and it certainly doesn't match mine. By the way, my install was originally a 9.x LTS, upgraded to a 10.x over the network while running under vmware and I installed it in the first place because Centos didn't include a driver for the wifi and ubuntu 'just worked'.