I'm underwhelmed by the stability of #Ubuntu. Things *generally* work, but:
It's a coin toss if it will recognize the wifi card on a particular bootup.
Sometimes it works when I tell it to restart; sometimes it just hangs.
Unity crashes disturbingly often. It pops up a bug report form, and *after* I fill in all the details, it informs me that it can't send the report.
@peterdrake a big part of my experience managing my devs who work in linux environments is that people end up with such diverse, bespoke implementations - which is of course a part of the point - based on individual preferences, hardware specs and so on that it's hard to generate a user community to provide mutual support bc everyone has such different issues. A very anecdotal view admittedly but one based in long experience. Still def glad to support it for the teams!
@mrcompletely My complaint is that I'm not doing anything exotic. I would expect the default configuration to work properly for core features like recognizing my not-home-assembled hardware.
@peterdrake well, just so - my only real feedback to you since I'm not qualified to help troubleshoot is that I see this fairly often across distros, and we use exclusively good quality, normalized hardware. I know "you're not the only one" isn't exactly useful but it can at least act as a sanity check I hope.
@peterdrake @mrcompletely The Unity spin of Ubuntu isn't the distribution's flagship. It's maintained by a group of enthusiasts.
Intel wifi typically works without issues. I've had problems with MediaTek wifi on Linux sporadically vanishing and not coming to life after a reboot. I've seen reports that, on dual boot machines, Windows puts the MediaTek card in a state that basically hides it from Linux the next time the user boots into it.
@peterdrake @mrcompletely I'll add that I had that "MediaTek wifi card vanishes on reboot" problem on an Asus laptop that wasn't dual boot.
@peterdrake Interesting. I haven't had the restart hang thing in ages. I run a lot of versions on a lot of old and new machines and am pretty happy with it. The transition from X11 to Wayland was rough but by now seems to work pretty well. With Unity, I assume you mean the game engine? I haven't checked this, but I bet you that it tries to do the Unix thing and send the bug report using sendmail, which by default is not installed. Configuring that is far from easy.
@JensHannemann Yes, the game engine. It's probably going to be my most-commonly-run app (other than a web browser) over the next year. Your guess on the bug reporter sounds reasonable. I don't know why it keeps crashing.
I have no idea how to fix the power and wifi bugs, which are nondeterministic.
On MacOS, this stuff just worked out of the box.
@peterdrake Yep, that's why I ended up using Macs as my main machines. I can always run VMs. Parallels is pretty good. Even on ARM Macs, the ARM versions of Ubuntu, Debian, and Windows are very nice. I don't miss x86 at all.
@peterdrake Case in point, I teach a wireless communication class this semester, using GNU Radio for software-defined radio. The MacPorts version of GNU Radio Companion has a bug that turns the canvas black, but only on ARM Macs. Running a Ubuntu or Debian VM using Parallels works perfectly, and the SDR I use has a sample rate of 20 MHz, so it's pretty taxing on the CPU and USB. No buffer over- or underruns whatsoever. Same on a student's MacBook Air using VMWare.
@peterdrake Hmm. My only real data point is a Dell XPS 13 9310 with the built-in wireless, running Budgie Linux, and it's been pretty stable.