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.
I’m not sure how it’s possible, but Linux Mint 13 is more stable for me than Ubuntu 12.04. That said, I haven’t experienced anything as bad as what you’re describing — just stuff like that Apport bug report thing being stuck into an endless loop because it crashes and then tries to report on its own crash.
Have been trying out 12.04 since its release last April and I am fed up with all those random crashes and the after-suspend instability. I have been using Mint 13 for the last few days and it is really way more stable. I still miss the ubuntu looks (have been using it since 10.04) but I will get used to it!
Which is weird, because it’s based on Ubuntu, but other folks report that, too.
I’m still running 10.10, but it’s much too obsolete.