As if that, that, and that weren’t enough, Ubuntu 12.04 suffers from random crashes that occur without doing anything more challenging than turning the damned thing on and signing in to a user account.

That problem report dates back to mid-December of 2011 and investigation has been ongoing, with notes like:

We are getting tons of crash reports in Ubuntu (https://launchpad.net/bugs/507062) about programs crashing

Yet Canonical decided to ship 12.04 anyway, with no fix in sight.

I think disabling suspend mode reduces the number of random crashes, but it still seems to be about one a day. Resuming from suspend mode definitely messes up the network connection more often than not, so we just won’t suspend it again.

This was a test installation on the Lenovo Q150, a bone-stock consumer PC, to see if I should upgrade the creaky 10.10 setup on my desktop box. Given the weird collection of hardware on my box (left- and right-hand trackballs, tablet, dual monitors with one rotated to portrait mode, etc), I’d hoped a “Long Term Support” version of Ubuntu / Xubuntu / whatever would be stable enough for use right out of the chute. Given the pervasive nature of the problems with 12.04, it’ll be at least a few more months before the code settles down and starts flying right.

That’s not encouraging for what was supposed to be a well-tested release, with more attention paid to stability than fancy features.

Mary is not pleased.