In practice, we rely on users to test and report. There are simply too many hardware configurations, use cases and user hacks out there to assume everything will just work.
And if people are unwilling to do this before release, why would you expect anything other than a big bucket of bugs when it did finally release? So no, don't assume it'll just work. Get involved before the next release.
And all this is why the LTS→LTS upgrades aren't issued until the first point release. The .0 is still considered unsuitable for production.
On the other hand, saying BSD just works is dishonest. They don't target the same users and don't do the same thing, it's like saying versioning in LibreOffice is buggy while git "just works". Try to give git in the hand of your mum and tell her to version her spreadsheet with it. It doesn't make sense.
This was my experience on a new laptop from dell. And it's not uncommon, just go to the windows 10 forums and you can find people with thousands of hardware issues even on brand new systems that shipped with Windows.
- often something doesn't; - it's nice share the experience and will help people to decide wether to install or not; - they are not thinking about comparing it to something else like BSD, but to previous experiences of the same kind of product.
SRSLY?
What exactly is eco friendly about shutdown versus suspend where it uses < 1W? Besides, the wear and tear of repeated shutdown/powerup cycles might mean it is a less "eco" friendly option in the end.
I don't think the way you run your laptop has appreciable environmental impact. The damage is in manufacturing and disposal. The best way to be eco friendly is to buy laptops that don't need to be replaced as often.
Assuming grandparent comment is shutting down the computer once or twice a day, it should be fine, I'm pretty sure the hard drive isn't going to fail from that.
What do you mean by this?
OSX isn't expected to work on any hardware that isn't curated by apple.
GNU/Linux apparently is held to the highest standards of all operating systems. Which is probably why it's the most used kernel/OS in the world and dominates nearly every market (mobile, IoT, servers, super computers, etc.).
suspend/hibernate not working is still better :D
That is true. There are unexplained caveats however, such as you'd need to know, for example, not to give the full disk to ZFS, because if you encrypt it, and you're not aware you need to do an off-machine metadata backup, after a power loss, you're screwed.
Linux distros may not always be perfect on release (hell, they are usually pretty shitty on release), but I never lost data like with FreeBSD before in the past 10 years of using linux.
I used FreeBSD as an FTP server for a few months about five years ago. I just don't see how it's better than Linux in anyway.
Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo, RedHat, all have documentation that's just as good as FreeBSD, Gentoo has portage which is basically ports, If BSD was really so much more stable than Linux then it would be more widely used in environments where stability is necessary, Linux dominates pretty much every market that isn't the desktop. Sure some companies use BSD, but in the end Linux dominates because it does whatever task you give it and does it well.
BSD is great, but pretending like it's somehow miles ahead of Linux is just asinine. I'd argue it's miles behind Linux when it comes to most modern tasks.
plus weird specific things, like at some point I had some issue with 15.04 having different security defaults requiring docker to run with some additional weird flag to let 32bit app run in the 64bit host, something which worked on 14.04 out of the box.
To put it another way, there are people for whom 16.04 is an upgrade from 15.10 and for whom 16.10 will be an upgrade to 16.04. I'm in that camp because it's a desktop and I'd rather not wait two years for the next version of my application software.
ubuntu developers take all effort to give you a userspace with everything working together, but there simply far too many choices of hardware which will break things.
I've a skylake laptop - power management sucks in all distro because kernel hasn't caught up yet[1]
I use a broadcom wifi chip which just got their firmware merged into mainline.
I don't know how *BSDs can import support for all shiny new hardware as they are launched. (Disclaimer: I have a thinkpad edge 2010 that runs openBSD happily)
What makes me especially angry is that I had an almost completely vanilla installation, apart from a few dev applications.
So many people are saying "yep, installed it and all works ok"
Were you expecting it to NOT work? This is a LTS release, I'd hope the Ubuntu team tested it enough to ensure there isn't major issue.
Not to get off topic but maybe because I've solely run *BSDs for the last few years I take for granted releases "just working".