‘Normal’ Ubuntu releases are not inherently less stable than ‘LTS’. The only difference is the support length (9 months vs. years) and immutability of the programs (‘stability’ in the sense of ’not changing’). Of course, if you change programs more frequently the chances of hiting a bug are higher, but it’s not different than running the LTS and upgrading the apps by hand, or upgrading an LTS after two years. In fact LTS users are only upgraded to the next LTS something like 6 months after its release to iron out the (normal) bugs.
If you are worried about stability you can use the normal Ubuntu releases, but only upgrade after a couple of months (some apps will take time to support it, anyways). Another option would be to stay on LTS but get the latest hardware support by using their Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE), which ships the newer kernels and firmware more frequently.
Hmmm… Now major issues with Kubuntu 20.04.3 (clean install) hanging at the motherboard splash screen, unless I select recovery mode from the grub menu… Maybe some sorta issue with Kubuntu 20.04, my motherboard and my Nvidia GPU!
*buntu based distros never used to be this difficult!
Just as well I’m having a year off from entering club competitions with my photography club, it’ll probably be next year before I have a working system again at this rate!
Remember I said I was going to return to Linux and even bought a newer than my old laptop refurbished laptop to give it a go. Nope, job and volunteer and job applications are swamping me. No time to spend on Linux or open source, which is yet another time sink. Yeah, it definitely will take time to get back into. Building and setting things up is so very fun. Keep at the fever pitch @Brian_Innes and @Claes!
Of course one other advantage of normal *Ubuntu based releases, rather than LTS, is it’s more likely to be able to support newer hardware, or have the most up to date libraries for software etc.
However for a production machine, perhaps more useful to be on LTS! I guess I need to have another look at Kubuntu 20.04.3, and actually diagnose the issue, to get it working well on my new hardware.
I am home . The oldest entry in the pacman log file on this computer is from September 12, 2011 (original Archlinux installation). However, the hardware has changed several times during this period .
Manually downgrading libexiv2-27 seems to have worked. Bit of a bodge though.
So the question is, where to go now. Especially since darktable 3.8 requires lua 5.4, which isn’t available for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS based distros, so no point going back to Linux Mint if it means I am unable to install darktable 3.8 due to missing dependencies.