Anyone else lost confidence in distros LiveCDs

Used to be I'd try a Live session. It'd play well. I would install it & my experience would the same as the LiveCD.

A few months ago I was trialing some LiveCDs on some of the 6-8 year old laptops that pass through my hands. About 5 worked well in Live sessions. But all of them failed in one way or another during or after installing. Some won't load, some would freeze & a couple didn't recognize the wifi hardware after install.

I'm thinking about this because I just downloaded a distro & I bypassed the LiveCD in favor of the install only .iso.

 

I've had Fedora act weird with the last 2-3 versions that have been out on my old box; it'd become unresponsive when installing from a live cd. I'd have to load it in basic graphic mode and that'd help. Might depend a lot on the GUI, maybe.

Tails has been really rock solid as a live cd for me, but obviously it's made to only be a livecd and not to install. But it's basically Debian and I believe Gnome 2.

 

zapjb: Never had your experience - and must say I wasn't aware this could happen.
I've only installed various versions of Puppy, Mint, PCOS, Mandiva,
and only used Parted Magic as a live CD.

I have some live iso's waiting on the shelf for a free box to install on, so I'll watch my step with extra caution.

Thanks ! I appreciate the call for caution.

 

Having used various distributions, and live rescue CDs on many laptops over the years, I've definitely come to expect them to fail in some way. And the GUI is usually insufficient to fix the problems - requiring one to resort to the command line.

My general attitude was to have as many live antivirus rescue CDs on hand as possible, because they proved to be quite inconsistent and unreliable. This was using burnt media or LiveUSBs.