3 ms·

I've had similar issues with Ubuntu upgrades in the past. I went to Debian (stable) instead, figuring the longer upgrade cycles would mean fewer problems. That

by jscn 16y ago

I've had similar issues with Ubuntu upgrades in the past. I went to Debian (stable) instead, figuring the longer upgrade cycles would mean fewer problems. That was all well and good until I needed to enable backports to upgrade Firefox to >=3.5 for work. Now the package manager's broken due to some weird dependency issues. I don't understand why there is no free software equivalent of Apple, selling (laptop) hardware and maintaining a GNU/Linux distro that's guaranteed to work on it. Surely there's a buck or two to made?

dkarl 16y ago
There are a couple such companies, I think. One is called Emperor Linux (if it's still in business) and offered reasonably late-model Vaio laptops among others.
- blasdel 16y ago
  And to my knowledge none of them do direct distro maintenance to keep the laptops they've sold supported -- they just resell OEM (Sager-style) laptops that they spec conservatively so that all the hardware is supported when sold.
mgedmin 16y ago
I think an LTS version of Ubuntu would be better than Debian, if you want longer upgrade cycles. ZaReason and System76 are two vendors that sell laptops with Ubuntu. I don't know if they actively support Ubuntu upgrades for their hardware (in the sense of testing/fixing bugs).