Re: My next computer and its support

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 07:47:59AM -0800, [email protected] wrote:
> I am a very old man, 84 years old.

If you join the Debian Users mailing list, you won't be the
oldest active participant.

>         I haven't been able to get the latest versions of Chrome and Chromium
>         to work under it.
> 
>         The paid support varies from really terrible, to mediocre, and very
>         occasionally good.
> 
>         And the next version of it, RHEL 7, will use systemd instead of init.
> 
>               I know almost nothing about systemd except that using it will
>               mean I will have to learn a lot of new stuff and that one of
>               its authors is the author of the RHEL 6 sound system, which has
>               given me endless grief. For those two reasons, I would like,
>               all other things being equal, to avoid it.
> 
> I'm thinking of switching from Red Hat to Ubuntu, but have no idea how much
> of an improvement, if any it would be. So I would like to know:
> 
>      Can the latest versions of Chrome and Chromium be easily installed on
>      Ubuntu?
> 
>      Does Ubuntu use systemd?
> 
>      What kind of paid support is available for Ubuntu?
> 
> I would much appreciate any advice.

Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian with a lot of differences
apparent in the standard desktop environment. (Ubuntu uses
Unity, which they develop.) You are more likely to see
differences there than in anything else. You can avoid that
by installing the GNOME, MATE, XFCE or LXDE systems instead,
all of which are available.

I share your concerns about systemd, and some others. Ubuntu
and Debian have switched over to using systemd.

However, Debian does not mandate systemd. It's perfectly
reasonable to run a stable Debian system with sysvinit, OpenRC
or any of a few other init systems; it takes a minute or so and
a reboot to take care of that.

Current Ubuntu and Debian versions have no problems with Chrome,
Chromium, or Firefox.

I'm not sure what paid support is available for Ubuntu, though
I'm sure it's available. I have found that the Debian mailing
lists are an excellent resource.

-dsr-