Re: Watch out for Netplan!
Curious what was wrong with 10.04 LTS ? That was the last Ubuntu I used on my desktops, stayed on it till maybe 18 months past end of life and reinstalled with Mint MATE 17 which I still use today (didn't think I could bear GNOME 3 nor Unity).
Also ran 10.04 LTS on a few hundred VMs no issues, 12.04 was fine for servers, 16.04 is being a bitch with systemd. I have had maybe 6 weeks of experience fighting systemd so far and I just keep asking myself why are you(systemd) breaking stuff that worked fine for so many years? The eth0 stuff sucks too but at least there is a kernel parameter workaround for that.
I tried HiDPI support on Mint 17 MATE 1.12 (still using it now) two years ago and most things were fine, the deal breakers for me were when I was running windows 7 in a VM, remote desktop was unreadable and the Vmware vSphere .NET client was also unreadable. I tried several things to resolve but nothing worked. Switched back to 1080p. Maybe windows 10 would of helped there in the VM I don't know, but 1080p is just fine(lesser of two evils for me vs changing to win10), I saw no difference with 4k (Lenovo P50) other than it just made everything smaller making me have to increase font sizes and increase everything to compensate.
I have 4k available in case I change my mind, though my previous laptop was 1600x900 which I ran with for many years, no issues with that either. I do use 16 virtual desktops(I suppose I am a tiny minority who does NOT like multiple monitors, and always uses the internal screen of the laptop regardless of having other monitors available) and use brightside for edge flipping. The setup is perfect for me (same setup since at least 2010).
Linux on desktop has been good enough for me for as long as I can remember now (maybe 10+ years), the only things that really need updating are hardware support.
(Linux user on desktop/laptop since ~1997, Debian since 2.0 in 1998 - I still remember spending ~4 hrs on my first debian install with dselect choosing packages, apt was maybe 1 or 2 years later though I still rely on dselect today via 'apt-get dselect-upgrade' on a regular basis)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
