[sjellis]

"Linux on a laptop still seems like an endless stupid time hole - I had the Ubuntu installer reliably kernel panic on me the other day."

Reading comments like this, I can't help but feeling that somebody is missing a trick here: I don't doubt your experience, and I've seen similar comments, but they don't match my experience at all, which is that Linux works with no tinkering. It would be really interesting to collect experience reports from folks like you, to see why there is such a divergence, and figure out what could be done about it. Back in the day, the worst cause of Windows crashes was basically a single problem: the quality of ATI drivers were bad, and once that was clear, it got fixed.

[josephg]

Thats a great idea. For what its worth, in my case I was using the 16.04.3 LTS installer (17.10 had been pulled at the time due to a bios issue). The kernel was panicking on boot because of issues using the opensource noveau driver for my NVIDIA gtx1080 graphics card. I needed to blacklist the driver to get the installer to boot. (And once I did that it ran fine.)

I ran into exactly the same bug installing ubuntu on my friends' PC a couple of weeks ago. In his case he has an nvidia graphics card from a few generations ago. (8xx series? 7xx? I can't remember.)

Whatever the bug is presumably its been an unfixed problem in the 'LTS' release branch for 2+ years.