Ubuntu Horror Stories! Actually for what Ubuntu is, I rather liked it. It began at work, I was notified we would be carrying the Ubuntu line in a data center and it was suggested that I look into it, become familiar with it. At least at that time, you could click a link on a web page and they would mail you a hard copy of the disk! Well that is a plus for noobs not needing to know how to download and burn an ISO to disk. I do not remember why, but for what ever reason I got a hard copy. Maybe I did not have a DVD burner yet? I forget, but not too many day later I got an Umbuntu disk mailed to me. My setup was on a laptop with 4 partitions, boot, windows, linux, data. Since I keep any important data on a separate partition, I scrubbed the Linux I had installed on it (Fedora?) and put Umbuntu there. Another plus, went in like a charm and only needed to do some minor cleaning of the boot manager. (Lilo? Grub? I forget which one it was.) Being a gamer I eventually got into the untrusted repos just to play around, and of course eventually found a poorly written game in python that broke everything. Not really all that bad specific to Umbuntu, one of the typical weaknesses of game developers messing with a core language that can shred any Linux distro. So over all I rather like Umbutu for a play around home kind of system. Not exactly what you want for a professional system, but great fro beginning Linux users, or home users that are simply tired of all the Windows based viruses. A was a fan, until ...

So I go to wipe the Umbuntu partition #3 but the Umbuntu partition manager is color coded (WITH NO LABELS!) Unknown to me, when I deleted partition #3 of 4 and recreated it, it did not do what most partition managers would do. Instead it deleted partition #3 and created partition #5. Then I formatted the 3rd partition in the color coded list which was partition #4 (ALL OF MY DATA), and installed a fresh copy of Umbuntu. Result? All data lost, and one Umbuntu disk being used as a frisby!

Yeah, thats one of the issues. Other than when I had hard drive issues I've never really had a window manager outright crash. Until I installed Ubuntu.

Yeah I'm kinda thinking about giving it a shot again.

Yes it is! I pretty much stated that in the first sentence of the message.

I normally recommend OpenSUSE

it is however a bit of an odd ball in the rpm camp

Slackware or an Ubu LTS?

Check out Mint. I'd not recommend "Betsy" (LMDE2 / Betsy at this time. It's almost "there" but they're working hard to squash the few remaining issues.
It is rock-solid and has some issues related to some specific (obscure?) hardware, but what OS doesn't?

Usually for newbies to Linux I recommend Slackware anymore. It may seem a large step, but I've learned that the more you get your feet wet, the more you learn, the more you enjoy yourself and enjoy the Linux experience.

Newbies taught the right way, learn more, retain more, and through subtlety, appreciate more about the proud heritage of GNU/Linux.

Slackware keeps it simple, down to Earth, and teaches you skills you just don't learn any more elsewhere. Skills like reading logs, scripting techniques, rebuilding packages, manual dependency resolution, etc.

If you can learn Slackware, you can branch out to any distribution painlessly, especially advanced distributions like Gentoo, Funtoo, B/LFS, and CRUX.

I find this thread amusing as I rarely see anyone recommend Ubuntu to anyone without some kind of caveat -- for example "but be sure to try Mint".
Oddly the OP then goes to give examples of where Ubuntu was the right thing .
Sorry, just being awkward.

I find it partially amusing that people are recommending standard MINT, because that's based off of Ubuntu.

I do recommend MINT, but MINT Debian.

Well, yes, of course you are correct. My point being thought that even when recommending Ubuntu (which, after all, isn't that bad) some nod is usually given to Unity being "not for everyone".
Mint does also, depending upon your country of origin and laws, tend to provide the non-free software more readily.
I would recommend trying LMDE, certainly. Hopefully it's less buggy than it was.

It also has a lot (most?) of the bugs worked out and comes with a usable DE.

The changes that Mint make to its Ubuntu base are mostly changes and additions in the DE, a large part of them, I guess, are more cosmetically (ripping out the Ubuntu logo/theme and/or adding the Mint logo/theme as default), many are due to adding the Cinnamon and MATE DEs, and the Mint tools. While there are some packages changed out from the Ubuntu base, their number is rather small, so I would guess if there is an essential problem in the Ubuntu core system you will also find it in Mint and other derivatives.
For anyone interested, list of packages in the Mint repository (for 17.2 Rafaela) can be found here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Rafaela

OK, I won't.

I never have.

HI

I Been using Ubuntu for 4 yrs and seriously all those years. Ubuntu wasn't stable for me even the LTS version.Usually the software that I install would work for a month and it will crash without notice and will always give me the crash report (Worst are the Unity Crash Reports)and bug me on frequent update request which is annoying as I don't have fast internet connection for frequent update,Then, I decided to switch to Linux MINT [MATE Desktop] Edition.Believe it or not I only update my system after the first installion and then after 6 month only I made my second system update.For 6 month my system was stable and did not inform me of any crash or even a Bug.It was working GREAT!!!.

As a saying goes "Your First Impression Would be The Best Impression!"

If Ubuntu is in such unstablity it would make new user to linux give up on LINUX for ever (Even I had the thought of Ditching LINUX when Ubuntu was my first linux distro with that kind of crash reports).

So I would like the linux community to advice on new comers to Linux to use MINT or Anyother stable Distro. I would also recommend the use of CentOS for Beginners

You had a bad experience and some might say that you allowed that situation to continue too long.

Not everyone has a bad experience with Ubuntu.

I'm not going to say it's wonderful. I will say that it is OK, and that I do use it every on two development machines and it does not crash, has not crashed, the uptime on both of these machines is "whenever the office last lost power - in excess of a year ago"

Nobody is saying that some default Linux recommendation is out there telling new users to use Ubuntu.

The OP made a rant thread. To their credit, they also said in post #1 that they were ranting. And I bet along with many, the OP their self realizes that you can should something, have a very adamant opinion, but it doesn't mean that's going to change much.

The fact remains that in the list of desktop distributions, Ubuntu is one of the ones which stands to be recommended to new users, by experienced users. This is not a policy, nor a mandate, it's just person's opinions.