Succinctness has never been my forte so apologies in advance; I've bolded the actual question but the background may be useful. This question is a little wooly but it'd be nice to know what I should be considering in choosing between two releases. I'm not asking for help on the i915 issue; I've given up on that and I'm okay with it. My hardware's old and sometimes things are just not meant to be.
I recently (March 2016) abandoned my long-term Debian installation (a media server, basically) in favour of Ubuntu; due to crashes and too many backports. I used 15.10 (server) with the intention of upgrading to 16.04 once it had been out for a few weeks with no major issues reported. 15.10 was fine; yesterday I upgraded and of course everything went kaboom. Long story short, the upgrade went fine but I don't believe that 16.04 can give me graphics at all. This appeared to be an i915 bug with the 4.4 kernel but after falling back to my 4.2 from 15.10 and trying 4.3 and a number of point releases of 4.5 I came to the conclusion that there's something else at play too; I also did a full fresh install of 16.04 server and found exactly the same issues at play (no login screen without disabling modeset, and no X at all; which makes for a most displeasing media server). I'm now aware that a lot of people have had i915 problems with this release and gave up after around 18 hours straight of trying fixes and workarounds.
Because I am A Clever Person, I backed up all of the configs etc. I might need in case of a catastrophic failure and/or full reinstall, and then promptly forgot to move them off the HDD before reinstalling. And I never got round to cronning my nightly backups again. File recovery tools have been about as successful as you'd expect so I'm expecting to have to redo a lot of stuff from scratch.
We're talking a very basic Kodi/SABnzbd+/Transmission/Sonarr/mpd setup here (with Apache handling the SSL and authentication for web services). Debian-based distros have randomly (but often) hung for me completely whilst running X (which I'm assuming is also an issue with my CPU/GPU, an old i3) but I really want to continue using Ubuntu as X only runs for Kodi and I'd taken to shutting Kodi down when not in use, which had made for minimal crashes (hence I don't consider a desktop release suitable either). I'd almost jack the whole thing in and go for Windows (which I know doesn't crash on this box...for the same reasons, anyway!), but I'm so used to bash and SSH and use so many utilities in Linux that I just can't hack the thought.
So:
- I'm about to start from scratch with an Ubuntu Server installation, primarily to run the services listed above;
- bearing in mind that I may get a new motherboard and Core CPU/GPU unaffected by whatever bug I was struck by, but am unlikely to any time soon because I'm stubborn and the old ones work (mostly) and
- knowing that the problem I had with 16.04 may never be resolved, either in 16.04 or future releases (not a criticism),
for a long-term stable setup with which I can continue to receive newish releases of the software I use,
am I correct in thinking that I'm best going with 14.04, or is 15.10 in any way suitable given that support ends so soon?
- If that's not a simple question, which factors should I be considering in choosing between them?
My gut says 14.04 because staleness helped drive me away from Debian, but I'm somewhat terrified of the same problem I had with 16.04 making its way into an upgrade and trashing my setup again (I'm assuming that the kernel at least shares the blame for it).
I'm pretty confused by the EOL dates on the point releases at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases so I don't really understand whether a 14.04 install + dist-upgrade is "better" or "worse" than a 14.04.3 release + dist-upgrade, or pretty much identical. If anybody can throw a bit of extra info about that in it'd be appreciated.
