Comment by newsoftheday
8 hours ago
> Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing.
On Ubuntu starting in 2006 and Kubuntu the last several years, what you're describing doesn't and hasn't happened to me.
When I've tried other distros over the years, the issue you described has happened to me on:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Fedora
SuSE
Debian (yes, even Debian but it was with the unsupported drivers and the issue was in a WiFi driver)
But it has not happened on Ubuntu or Kubuntu since I started using them in 2006. We use desktop Linux on several machines here and have for a long time, from Dell to HP to Lenovo.
Yup, tried ubuntu. Probably gotten over a hundred of their free CDs in the mail over the year to give out. Milage may vary based on exact hardware. It works until it doesn't is the story. Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority. So many combinations of motherboards, graphics cards, wifi cards, sound cards, etc. I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.
I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.
> It works until it doesn't is the story.
No, that's not my story nor is it the story of the vast majority of Ubuntu/Kubuntu users.
> Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority.
That's a false statement, too many of us out here using Desktop Linux to try and make such a claim in 2026 (or even 20 years ago for that matter).
> I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.
Tens of thousands of us developers in IBM used Desktop Linux on Thinkpads and later Lenovos for your statement to not ring true with me.
> I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.
Those statements do not represent a truthful reality the majority of Desktop Linux users experience. This isn't 1996 in a random Linux IRC channel.
I honestly can't remember the last time an update broke anything for me in 20 years of linux, and rolling back to last stable has always been easy.
That's across various Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and even a crunchbang install.
In the past, especially on my custom desktop with uncommon GPU, sound card, and wifi chip, I'd check for compatibility and give it a few days after releases were announced to see if there were any user reported bugs. Knowing that devs prioritize compatibility for the most common devices first, I may have to wait my turn. If no, update. If yes, check for available solutions, update, apply solutions. If no solutions, wait.
But, for instance, currently I've been updating this Fedora 44 lenovo with the crunchy kernel roughly weekly for about a year, have been doing so blindly (just sudo dnf update && reboot before bed), and have not had a single problem in all of that time.
It's the same model as Windows- don't do shit before you know. You don't just install random garbage on a Windows machine, and you certainly don't allow automatic updates that re-enable features you've disabled, disable your ability to disable those features, break your menus, put ads on your lockscreen, put ads on your desktop, put ads in your menu, break hibernation, break wifi printing, or whatever other insane shit they've done in the last few years. You wait to update until you know all that broken shit has been removed or stay on XP until they pry it from your bloody knuckles or trust that some random dev doesn't have spyware in that de-bloated iso you've been thinking about.
Linux currently receives development from Intel, AMD, nvidia, google, facebook, qualcomm, amazon, and even Microsoft. Long gone are the days of the wild west governed by but a few.