Here we are, 2 decades in, and it's not stable. I've been using 12.04 for quite some time, and I like it. And it works great if you can keep it running. But I'm having a problem with my system, and forum posts from last year offer solutions that simply don't work on the current version. And that situation is recursive, back as far as I can remember, there is much more information about fixes that don't work than fixes that do work.
I'm using a liveCD I created on Windows because my system doesn't boot and the cd creator on Ubuntu doesn't work, at least for most people.
Here is something that has always bothered me. The livecd boots, sees my network and my video just works. My installed system is somehow misconfigured so that it doesn't see the network and the video doesn't work so I can't get X to run. Is there no way to fall back to that initial configuration so that the system can be fixed without running back and forth to a browser on another system? Oh, and I didn't change the configuration. I tried to install a proprietary video driver because I thought it worked, but installation failed, almost silently. My system kept working, so I didn't think about it, but today we had a power outage and now no network and no video. If you go onto these forums about how to fix a problem, it's fairly deep stuff. Especially if you only have a terminal. Yeah, it's nice to be able to twiddle the settings, but come on, my system is just barely misconfigured but I have to touch a dozen files distributed all over the file system? And most of the suggested twiddling doesn't work, nobody actually knows how this stuf works. Read any tutorial, it's a jumble of suggestions.
Guess what, the recovery option on boot is known not to be worthwhile. The "low resolution warning" thing is a joke. I finally figured out that alt-o would select yes. But I still haven't figured out how to change the selected option in the next screen. And if you select "continue in low resolution mode" it goes to a command prompt. If you want to fix your system, you have to go into a command prompt. Good luck remembering everything, because all the linux commands and file names you have memorized are no longer working. Some group of geniuses decided that way of doing things wasn't good enough. Now we have network manager, which is broken, Xorg, which is broken. And any number of other programs sitting on this system are broken.
I've wasted all morning and I think I'm just going to reinstall.
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