[conspire] upgrade from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS ?

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 08:13:58AM -0800:

> Opinion noted.  My point remains unchanged:  It is good policy to try
> the best current open source drivers _first_ and then if necessary
> fallback onto maintenance-impairing and long-term-problematic
> proprietary drivers as a last resort.  My point about the various Ubuntu
> community Web forums is that they characteristically are pushers of
> proprietary hardware drivers FIRST, which is doing nobody any favours.

The surprising problem is that very few Linux fora
actually filter out postings from non-Linux client
software, or at least flag postings by user agent.
(I have asked Jon Corbet to style the postings from
Linux and non-Linux browsers differently on LWN.net,
but no dice.)

You'll probably get different and/or better Linux
advice if you use a forum where someone has to get
at least far enough to run a browser (or better yet,
native mail client) in order to post.

> And, more reasonably, I would (and do) avoid purchasing such video
> hardware in the first place.  It's not that hard.  All you have to do is
> check supported hardware lists before hauling out your chequebook.

For desktop machines, you'll probably have to assemble
your own if you want a combination of Linux-friendly
video and decent components in other areas.  Often the
problematic video hardware is an upgrade that comes
with other parts you want.

I'd rather do some careful shopping up front than
spend a bunch of time on web boards playing vendor
Kremlinology on driver selection later on.

-- 
Don Marti                      +1-510-332-1587 (mobile)
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/        Alameda, California, USA
dmarti at zgp.org