Not a bad idea. The areas where I have the biggest problems with Ubuntu is hardware support and new updates just breaking my system. It's so bad that I REALLY want to just go to Debian Stable as my primary OS. I just can't handle that much downtime to switch over at home and the office.
I'm a developer. I don't give a shit about a fancy desktop. I just want my hardware to work good with the O.S. and for updates not to wreck my system. Why? Because I just want to write code, run what services and daemons I need, and read shit on the internet.
It's really fn frustrating. I've been using Ubuntu for 4 years solid now when I ditched Windows. I'd be willing to donate to the two areas I highlighted, but if shit didn't get better....
Your reference to Debian stable made me curious. Do you think that has less disruption than only installing Ubuntu LTS releases?
I haven't used Debian after switching to Ubuntu pretty early on. These days I stick to LTS on servers but can't resist upgrading to the latest shiny stuff every 6 months. I've had issues with upgrades and assumed that if I had stayed in the LTS path only it would be smoother.
By the way Ubuntu releases an LTS release every two years and the last 3 Debian stable releases have happened at 2 year intervals, so the two seem comparable.
I used Debian stable as my primary OS for a couple of years. While I was just fine without the fancy desktop, at the time Firefox was stuck on version 3.0 even though 3.6 was available.
I don't know what the situation is like now, since I haven't used linux on my laptop for a couple years, but if I were to go back, I would want something like Debian stable, but with an updated browser.
I can imagine it being more useful for things that are easily fixable/less critical.
I was running a testing desktop, and X updated in a way that broke the proprietary nVidia drivers (nVidia's fault -- not Debian's.) That was quite annoying to suddenly have to fix. Those types of issues (though rare, even in testing) would be nice to avoid.
Debian's idea of stable really means super duper rock-solid extremely stable. Which is ok, but I had a hard time running newer software on it. I now use Debian Testing, which is most people's idea of stable. Several debian-derived distros are based on Testing, so it's probably ok.
I am using Crunchbang, which is based on Debian stable. It is trivial to download and install either Firefox or Chrome from the internet, and they automatically update themselves (FF since v12; the betas have had auto-update for longer).
For a more general solution you could look into apt-pinning, but there are some downsides depending on which way you go about it.
I think Unity is the least worthwhile part of Ubuntu but since it's already here, I'd like them to fund an alternative, not remove funding and keep it as it is.
Edit: The page should a "make the desktop less awesome" side of the slider. If Unity is what they mean by "awesome", it should be slid back.
I realize it's not part of the default distribution, but installing xubuntu-desktop is a nearly-painless way to ditch Unity for XFCE. I've been very happy with it.
You can install Cinnamon (the window manager used by Linux Mint), and it's very good. It behaves "traditionally" (i.e. like Windows 7), and it's much prettier than XFCE.
I recently switched to Cinnamon and couldn't be happier.
I never really liked Unity, i used Gnome Shell and it was usable ok. But for my work nothing seems to beat the good old taskbar-based design.
I'm a developer. I don't give a shit about a fancy desktop. I just want my hardware to work good with the O.S. and for updates not to wreck my system. Why? Because I just want to write code, run what services and daemons I need, and read shit on the internet.
It's really fn frustrating. I've been using Ubuntu for 4 years solid now when I ditched Windows. I'd be willing to donate to the two areas I highlighted, but if shit didn't get better....