Re: The narcissism of small differences
Blather.
It worked quite well for me with 12.04, it's working quite well for me on my test environment. I might update the rest of the systems at home in the late summer to early fall, after the version bump comes out.
Upsides: newer kernel tree level. Enhancements of that which was a bit functional to be more functional.
My 5 year old+ systems are working fine, thank you, have zero clue what the author was blithering nonsense about, it's a matter of choosing frills you want or do not want.
But then, the vast and overwhelming majority of work that I do on the machines is on the command line. The only time I use the GUI is to write a formal letter, print it and post it or when I have to write a formal letter and, ugh, fax it.
What matters is this:
It works. It does the job. Other distros could as well, but this one works reasonably well with only modest tweaking *and* has an LTS version.
Out of five test machines, only one had a problem and that was an HD that was positively ancient failed hard. As much of my home environment is enterprise level servers and switches and the rest is older workstations, it's a "big shit", order a new HD and move on.
Had one bit of annoyance with one test netbook, with a massive 8 gig SSD, not quite enough space for a basic office system. Did an apt-get clear and life was good again. SSD tuning wasn't necessary, but I'll probably play with it to see what I can break, erm, improve. OK, don't see improvement in the cards.
One broken thing on that miniscule antique system is overlayfs, which has some brokeness inherited from debian. But, if I boot without the overlay, the base OS is up and can update without fudging by adding chances to the overlay on flash card and instead update the base OS on SSD.
As for it overall, it's an updated version of a solid distro. It isn't like we're talking about the difference between a Vic-20 and the GSV Grey Area.