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Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

> I've found the Ubuntu [Desktop] stability to be in constant decline over the time

I wish I never upgraded to 13.10. Sometimes drag-maximizing my window can crash my entire system. And compiz leaks memory like a sieve, sometimes I will wake up to find compiz using ~5.5gb of memory and the system will be unusable. Gotta restart!

When I first upgraded, I thought "oh, it's always like this at the start, they'll fix it." And here we are at the next version and it still hasn't been fixed.

Probably jumping ship (to another Linux distro) once my next work deadline passes.

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There was a nasty bug recently with xorg (Intel driver) eating RAM then the kernel OOM killer would swoop in and kill the desktop. I filed a bug on launchpad and the upstream Intel driver maintainer was super attentive and got it fixed. It was a rough time while the issue was around, but it happens..

13.10 has absolutely not been worth it for me, neither. Right now I can't even start (or restart) Unity at boot up. This might not be because of Ubuntu, but Windows 8 doesn't have any problems with starting (dual boot).

Or maybe dig in and contribute a fix?

Is this a serious suggestion? I can't even reliably reproduce it. It just happens randomly. The problem could be unity. It could be in compiz. It could be in the nvidia drivers, which I don't even have the source to. Who knows what in that mess causes my system to lock up.

Regardless, I do not have enough loyalty to Ubuntu to do this kind of work. There are a number of open source projects that I am involved with, and if I spend time on this (likely to be fruitless) endeavor, I end up with less time to spend on projects I care about.

My post is purely to vent, and to serve as a warning for those looking to try Ubuntu Desktop. My personal opinion is to try something else. I am.

For anyone who does have the time and inclination to debug this there are some comprehensive docs on the wiki https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Debugging - I've used these steps to get backtraces before so devs can get stuff fixed.

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