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I am thinking of buying Dell Inspiron 15, 3000 series that comes with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pre-installed (http://www.dell.com/uk/p/inspiron-15-3552-laptop-ubuntu/pd) I have been searching everywhere about the experiences of upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 on this machine, and so far it seems like the upgrade fails quite badly for most cases, with some others having problems with hardwares. But these search results dated at least 3 to 6 months back.

So I am wondering if there has been anyone who has succeeded with the upgrade with all the hardware working in order? How about other distributions such as Debian or Linux Mint? I would really love to have this computer but it would be a waste if 14.04LTS is the only OS that works, even if its support cycle ends in 2019. I will also be happy if someone knows of a link where people post their successful upgrades.

enoughsaid05
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2 Answers2

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In general, people don't post successful installs or upgrades. they post about failures. thus you have to try and objectively quantify the number of fail posts. the easier it is to find a post about a failure, the higher the change that you will have difficulty, this does not mean that it is impossible either.

most problems occur with device drivers. look for specific issues with 16.04 and your hardware. and how readily it was corrected.

ravery
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People have problems using their computers regardless of the OS they are using, regardless of the application they are running (Upgrade, or just generally running applications). The LTS upgrades are safe and thoroughly tested.

There are some occasions where there are options during the upgrade process where the user had a choice of keeping certain configurations settings are changing to the distribution default.

If they change to the system default, they may loose some of their time consuming fine tuning and settings, such as network configurations and file sharing.

Also, there are occasions where some applications (repositories) may become disabled because they haven't been fully tested and migrated to the new version. That would involve the user manually enabling the repository for the application and manually reinstalling it.

Neither of those cases should affect a person with a new computer that hasn't spent time with customization that requires updating, whereas they will already be in the process of customizing the new computer.

L. D. James
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