[jjoonathan]

On my Dell Precision 6800:

* "Supported" ubuntu was so old that neither Chrome nor Firefox would update

* Latest ubuntu constantly toggled the backlight at 30fps (yes, really).

* They didn't provide a driver package, instead they provided a utility to bake drivers into install media. Naturally, it didn't work, the documentation described a significantly different version.

* All these problems were well-represented in forlorn solutionless forum / stack overflow threads.

[PascLeRasc]

Where did you get info on what the "supported" Ubuntu version is? I've installed 18.04 on C2D machines and it looks like your machine has a Haswell CPU. The latest version of any Linux distro you want will work.

Also, did you ever try these utilities to set the backlight PWM? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/backlight#Backlight_PWM...

[jandrese]

I think he's referring to the version that Dell ships with the laptop. But that laptop has been out of support from Dell for so long I don't know why this is a problem, it's not like you were going to be able to call them up and get support on it anyway.

In my experience Ubuntu on Dell laptops tends to just work. Even things you might not expect like the volume keys on the keyboard.

[rbanffy]

Usually Ubuntu takes care of browser updates by itself - you don't (shouldn't) update browsers yourself.

[mr_toad]

I’d take any notion of ‘supported’ versions of Linux with a grain of salt. It usually just means that those are the only versions that they’ve tested.