So last year my wife decided that she was sick of her 2017 MacBook Air being out of support. Mainly it was that her browser wasn’t updated and she was increasingly unable to access websites she used frequently. I grabbed a bunch of different liveUSB imgs, and ElementaryOS was the only one that would even boot. So that’s what we installed. Some minor early issues that I’d anticipated with the webcam. And everything was fine, just worked.
Then there was a kernel version upgrade. Which resulted in a kernel panic. Update had replaced the newer broadcom driver with an older broken one, and that derailed the whole thing. Fine, relatively easy fix.
6 months of minor updates, and now we’re on vacation, but my wife has a teams meeting she has to attend. We’re testing out the WiFi at the hotel and just making sure everything is up to date and functions as expected. Webcam isn’t working, and there’s no FacetimeHD driver anymore. Cool, it was pretty easy to install the first time once I’d found all the files and full instructions. Then get a notification about an update, so update it. Kernel panic.
The Devs rarely interact with any of the places they say to ask questions, there’s not really any good documentation. And I really can’t be fucked trouble-shooting for an hour or two every time the kernel version changes.
The idea of ElementaryOS is nice, set and forget, MacOS like looks, but it really hasn’t been anywhere near a painless experience. I’m no Linux Greybeard, but I am experienced and knowledgeable enough to muddle through most issues. The fact that it’s presented as a noob friendly distro that requires no/minimal administration is, in my opinion, kinda BS. As long as nothing goes wrong during updates…
Default for grub is to run a 0 timeout and hidden. After the first update malarkey I changed it, but apparently that only lasted to the next update…
My advice for anyone who is looking for a distro for someone who isn’t very tech literate, avoid ElementaryOS. It lulls you into a false sense of stability, then when it breaks, it breaks hard.
Elementary is based off Ubuntu and I don’t think they maintain a separate kernel so the issue would likely happen on every other Ubuntu based distribution. Elementary is marketing itself as noob friendly because what differentiates them is their desktop environment which aims for a simplified user experience.
I don’t think this is exactly correct. The distro maintainer is responsible for choosing when and how to roll out/test upstream updates. So if they are doing their job, they would be pumping the brakes on specific kernel updates until they’ve worked out issues with them (or waited for upstream to fix them). So distros based on Ubuntu may or may not experience the specific issues that get rolled out upstream of them. Also, there could’ve been things elementary os was combining with the kernel updates that could’ve caused breakages.