Some of those Cons sound pretty bad, especially the graphics problems. A lot of those I figure I could live with, but some, like the constant noise on the graphics or a low-quality touchpad would be just too much to tolerate.
I am currently awaiting my (pretty damn expensive) Framework 16 at this time, and I can only hope my experience will be a bit better than yours…
And constant non-optional pop-ups nagging you to upgrade to Ubuntu Pro during those five years. I’d actually be kinda okay with it if it were only after, an if just as a reminder that, hey, the LTS period is over, you need to switch to the next LTS release now.
Pro tier is for Enterprise customers who need extra-long term support and are willing to pay for it. Canonical is meeting a market demand so they can remain competitive for use in those environments, which is good for everyone. It’s benign
Then please show me the button (and I mean button, not command-line exclusive settings or config file entries in /etc, and certainly not unofficial trickery like third party repositories that replace Ubuntu advantage packages with an empty decoy) that says “Thank you, I don’t need Ubuntu Pro, please stop nagging me about it”.
Depends a lot on what kind of user. I specified “non-technical” with a reason. I have, in the past, recommended Ubuntu to a small number of friends and family members. These are people who aren’t particularly comfortable using computers in the best of times. They very much don’t need the newest, best and most shiny versions of everything. They need to do billing, taxes, correspondance, email and various other tasks related to their small business, they need that to work reliably, and if at all possible, to work exactly the same way as it did the last five years. And if there is any pop-up they don’t immediately understand (for example because it’s in English instead of their native language, yes that still happens in Ubuntu quite a bit), they will call me on the phone.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had to support non-technical end-users, but for some of them, even something as seemingly trivial as a menubar that has moved from the top to the side can be issue that needs explaining and training. For that kind of user, I really do want to postpone all updates beyond pure bug and security fixes for as long as reasonably possible. Five years sounds reasonable. Six months does not.
It does have quite a bit of overhead, meaning it’s not the fastest out there, but as long as it’s fast enough to serve the media you need, that shouldn’t matter.
Also, you need to either mount it manually on the command line whenever you need it or be comfortable with leaving your SSH private key in your media server unencrypted. Since you are already concerned with needing to encrypt file share access even in the local network, the latter might not be a good option to you.
The good part about it is, as long as you can ssh from your media server to your NAS, this should just work with no additional setup needed.
If it was, I don’t think it was a default. I had been using Windows 7 for quite a while back in the day, and I cannot remember ever seeing something like this. On the other hand, I can certainly remember losing track of where on my monitors my mouse cursor was on various occasions…
This is on Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, so well within the 5 year window. I’m complaining because I kept getting frantic calls from people using that who didn’t know what was going on.