this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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I mean it depends on the hardware - you can get unlucky with that, sure. I've usually installed timeshift so it can be easily restored if necessary, but I've never had to restore any of the systems I setup besides my own - since Ubuntu 12.04 - around 12 years ago.
LTS is what I go with so no bleeding edge updates, and I've not setup anyone else's system that has a dedicated GPU so many of the common issues don't apply in my case.
However, I remember from 8.04 - 12.04 having a complete fking nightmare with WiFi adaptors. I get a twitchy eye just thinking about ndiswrapper...
I’ve done an update and suddenly bluetooth doesn’t work. Or audio. Or the network is fucked. Or there’s no display on soft reboots, and you have to completely shutdown, turn off and restart to get video again.
One of the current Microsoft-induced selling points for linux is that it's supposedly a great alternative for hardware that doesn’t support TPM, particularly for people who wouldn’t know how to disable that requirement on Win11 and above. Well, guess what? All that equipment is old. So all the arguments that it’s a hardware problem are not great for linux, since it’s linux that doesn’t play nice with it without fiddling.
For a time I was able to turn this machine into a Hackintosh that ran MacOS well with everything compatible, including the video card before they switched to metal and discontinued support for nVidia drivers. That was easier than getting linux to work and stay working properly, and it’s well documented how much of a pain Hackintoshes were to get working right.