[npsimons]

or trying other OSs other than Ubuntu such as CentOS or something from Joyent.

Or even just Debian. I ran into issues (years ago) with Ubuntu stability due to closed source drivers on a laptop; sure, I have the skills to debug that sort of thing, but why waste my time? I had been running Debian just fine on desktops and servers for years, and after switching the laptop to it, the lockups stopped.

I'm more than willing to admit there may be real technical issues they ran into, but it sounds to me like they gave up too easy, and we may never know what the problems are. Would've been nice to at least have seen a bug report (honestly don't know if they submitted any, but I'm willing to bet they didn't).

[beatgammit]

Or Arch Linux. Arch packages are pretty vanilla, so it would be a pretty good way to reduce the attack surface.

Also, with Arch, you get less by default, so you'll end up with a cleaner system. I didn't realize how much stuff I didn't need on a default install of Fedora until I set up an Arch system.