So I had some time recently to sit down and do a fresh install of ubuntu 15.04 mostly for fun. Everything installed fine, worked fine, and updated/upgraded fine.
Then I tried to install other programs........
I started by trying to install cairo-dock and used open GL acceleration. It installed, but the dock was horribly slow and unresponsive. I looked up what version of mesa I was using and it turned out to be some stupidly old version. It turns out that sometimes ubuntu does not want to update the mesa driver. So I had to install the edgers ppa and update it that way. It was a pain, but it worked.
Then I wanted to install steam. I tried both steam from the ubuntu store and the download file from the steam website. Neither worked. It turns out there are a number of bugs that prevent the correct dependencies from installing. So I had to work through all of that crap.
I finally got steam working and I installed TF2, and that did not render well nor perform well.
So I tried installing the proprietary drivers....which in turn caused steam to not work again.
It is just one problem right after another with this POS.
Elementary OS and Linux mint both seem to have issues these days with a lot more reported bugs.
what the hell is going on? Ubuntu and it's derivatives have never been this problematic since the release of 13.04.
Funny 13.04 was when I got out of Ubuntu and atbthat stage I was just not happy with it and all the changes and the incompatibility just not worth it anymore.
I don't see any reason why somebody would install the buggy and outdated Ubuntu. 12.10 was the last release that worked for me. Go Debian if you want it very stable, more stable than Ubuntu with just as outdated packages. Go Sabayon if you want both stability and new software. Go Arch/Antergos if you are a bit more advanced.
I have not been using Linux as a main pc for long, but I have not had issues with steam or cairo deck at the time i was using 14.10 with gnome. but have since moved to xfce and no longer use cairo deck. However, steam works just fine. all i did was sudo apt-get install steam.
I find its more stable now in certain areas and less stable in others. When it comes to drivers everything seems better than the Ubuntu 9.xx days, but I find that there are sometimes more crashes and system hangups than before. Granted I am also running on hardware that is 13 years newer now (Ideapad Y500 vs an ancient Inspiron 3800), so results will vary. I'm a little hesitant to say graphics drivers are better, the Nvidia drivers for this laptop just seem so terrible compared to the Windows version. I'm also running 15.04 on here, not 14.04 which might be more stable.