On Sat, 19 Apr 2014 13:20:27 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Sigh. Yes. spent two days trying to upgrade laptop before reinstalling
the last thing that worked on it (MINT 14).

Seems that a combination of newer drivers and graphics cleverness to
support yet more eye candy, with legacy hardware, has resulted in a
video layer that either goes mad on CPU cycles* or segfaults ...

Investigation of the Asus EEPC shows that that too, stops at Mint 13, as
that was the last known release that supported its graphics driver.

Why would I need to upgrade? Once again the terrifying stranglehold of
Microsoft was the reason. I wanted to be able to read an MS word docx,
and the latest but two release of Libre office didn't understand the one
I got sent.

The later ones do, but they are only supported by later and different
versions of the underlying Ubuntu releases.


The horrifying truth is that its Microsft that is driving the
development of Linux at the eye candy desktop level, and its Microsoft
and the need to be compatible with it that is driving the development of

I feel your pain. Seems there's no easy way to cut oneself off from MS
dependency without a world of aggro from the inadequate alternatives.