I think brianL is secretly building an army of clones

No. I don´t use to test alpha/beta versions.

I got a hold of a Ubuntu 14.04 USB stick and after some difficulty (I am 67 years old and not very tech. savy)I was able to patrician my Dell Precision M4500 15.6" Laptop, 1.73 GHz Core i7 Quad, 8 GB, 250 GB, DVDRW, Windows 7. It took me three try's and many hours I finally got it on and working. I have one bug I would like help fixing. When I play youtube Vids the system freezes up the curser will not move the keys do nothing. Of course Control Alt. Delete doesn't work (needles to say) its frozen in time. All I can do is hit the power on button for 7 seconds and start over. What am I doing incorrectly? Thanks in advance for all responses. This my first post so explain step by step to the newbie.TY I don't try alpha or beta versions do to inexperience. If I live long enough to be confident I will.

Fedora 20 I grabbed the alpha and started running with that. F19 I started from the beta. With the new F21 I am unsure how I will approach this as it is a different setup.

If I spot a problem I will report it but I tend to find others beat me to it.

I run Debian Sid on my PCs and I use the Nightly version of Firefox. I also like to load various distros in VMs to check out their features and a lot of them are testing varieties. I use a beta version Second Life client also. I don't often report bugs etc. but I do use the built-in reporting tools.

@ skygypsy You'd better open your own thread with your question, that's what LQ is for, after all. (Supposition: it's probably drivers...).

Oh, and to the original question: no. I'm not good enough for that, but I report bugs if I can.

While I voted no I would use beta programs occasionally but never distros or drivers.

Not really Alphas or Betas, but back in my Debian days I used a mix of Sid and Experimental, I used Slackware -current for some time and I am running Gentoo ~amd64 (which is their development branch) now, but I plan to switch back to the stable branch once the multilib transition of Gentoo is final. I used development/unstable branches mainly for getting the latest AMD open source drivers, but I switched back to Nvidia and their blob again, so this is not necessary anymore. Maybe I will have a look at nouveau once it becomes more mature.

I really don't like having beta packages in my system. But I made an exception to test google chrome version 37 beta to test playing netflix using html5 with drm ( no silverlight or wrap-arounds required ) incorporated in the chrome beta 37 browser.