I’d been running Trusty Tahr (14.04 LTS) since late 2014 and in the main I’d been very pleased with it. Admittedly there have been a few bugs. These included odd Wi-Fi drop-outs, fairly regular black screens after bringing out of suspension, and rare inexplicable freezes. All in all though it’s been a good and productive few years of ‘Windows-free’ Linux laptop use. I first used Trusty on my old Belnea laptop that originally ran the train wreck that was Vista. When I decided to run 14.04 on another machine I purchased a Lenovo G500 laptop preinstalled with Ubuntu. The security aspect is one of the most satisfying aspects of running Linux. Canonical are usually on the ball with security updates and apart from some browser hardening I have no need for additional security programs; especially an AV. It is quite liberating knowing that an anti-virus program won’t accidentally eviscerate my hard drive by removing system drivers which are in reality mistaken false positives. Plus there are security issues of AV companies having access to personal computer hard drives. On Boxing Day 2018 (26th December for non-Commonwealth readers) it suddenly dawned on me I only had until next April for continuing update support from Canonical. When the updater offered me an upgrade to 16.04 Long Term Support (as usual) I accepted. This was preferable to the anorak alternative of doing a totally clean install. Four and a half hours later I was running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ‘Xenial Xerus’. The main install was about three hours and then a further ninety minutes to remove ‘obsolete’ software. It all went smoothly apart from being asked occasional questions which I had no answer to and didn’t understand anyway. So, apparently a normal Ubuntu upgrade process then. Xenial is very similar to Trusty in appearance, some launcher icons were different and the Software Centre has changed (now GNOME Software). My planetarium software, Celestia, had been removed (it isn’t in the new repo) by the upgrade process but Cartes du Ciel, which I ran on 14.04, and Stellarium were still there and run perfectly (well CdC does). The calculator is slightly more advanced and now has various additional modes. An image manipulation program, ImageMagick, is also now bundled. Although to me it appears and acts more like abandonware. I already have GIMP and Pinta anyway. I also eventually managed to convince the optical drive to play DVD’s on ‘Videos’ aka Totem; which is the official movie player of the GNOME desktop environment. I can also run DVD’s on SMPlayer and VLC. My VLC copy was replaced by a ‘snap package’. It did have some problems playing DVD’s and its icon sometimes mysteriously disappeared when locked on the launcher. I now run the non-snap VLC, which runs fine. There have been some other bugs however. Early on I experienced a Wi-Fi drop-out, but closing the laptop lid then opening it again seemed to cure it. A bit later I had to reboot three times before connecting to my router. Drop outs aren’t unknown at the distance I was from my router and also occasionally happens with my tablet and ChromeBook. However, I did have a couple of drop-outs in rapid succession a few days later. I was literally right next to my router. A couple of reboots and it was fine though. Hours later it was still connected to the WiFi even after several suspensions and with the laptop now a fair distance from the router. AbiWord also had a known (new to me) weird screen flickering bug and became increasingly difficult to use. I switched to the bundled LibreOffice Writer and even finally figured out how to enable its spell checker. The strangest bug was the disappearing mouse cursor after the computer is brought out of suspension/sleep mode. It didn’t occur until after a few days after the upgrade (and several updates). I’d never experienced it on 14.04 and it didn’t reoccur after happening only three or four times. A reboot cures it although the computer has to be shut down or restarted employing the keyboard only. So far there has been no black screen after waking from sleep mode, which did happen fairly frequently with Trusty Tahr. Although easily remedied with a reboot it’s another one of those odd but known ‘Ubuntu’ things. I’ve been reliably informed that this is almost certainly a driver problem. I can understand this on any old hardware but this is a bit of an issue on a Levono laptop that is supposedly deliberately ‘Ubuntu compatible’. I had planned to hang on to 14.04 right up until April and wasn’t sure what I’d replace it with. For two months now I haven’t had any glitches, gremlins or bugs at all on Xenial Xerus. It’s now St David’s Day (1st March) and regardless of all the naysayers and disaster-mongers claiming that 16.04 was the worst Ubuntu release in history I find that overall it is more stable than its predecessor. So I’m a happy St David’s Day bunny. I’ve even found a Xenial wallpaper with a traditional St David’s Day daffodil. Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!
I am still thinking what do do with my Trusty - I was thinking the same as you ... or maybe 18.04 with Unity or 18.04 + Plasma. Mrk
Well, a year and a day after upgrading to Xenial it's still going strong. Overall, I think 16.04 LTS is more stable than Trusty was. I use Opera (snap) as a back-up browser now, instead of Chrome. But apart from a much greater stability when waking the computer from suspend mode, everything's business as usual.
