Yesterday I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu Mate 17.04 to 17.10. I downloaded the iso file, burn it to a disc and tried to upgrade. What, the option for upgrade is grayed! I can only instal it as a new OS, it wasted my time for download. Usually I upgrade my Ubuntu using the upgrade tool not from a CD/DVD ROM. I never knew I can't upgrade from disc.
That is typical with non-rolling distros. Fortunately things have advanced in the past 20 years and we have better options.
My computer is not very high-end, but I want the OS that can support my NVidia Geforce 430 and Wacom tablet. It should has good userbase and documentation, so I can easily find answers if I ever have problem. And of course, it must be Lazarus friendly.
What Linux do you use? Which one will you recommend me? And why?
Short answer: a rolling distro that has the latest versions of SW, including FPC and Lazarus.
Longer answer: Most popular mainstream distros are stable and work well except for 2 situations:
1. Installing a latest version of SW you are interested in. You must either by-pass the distro package system or use 3rd party packages which have a big chance to break things. At least I screwed up my Xubuntu although I can use Linux relatively well.
2. Updating the whole OS. Error-prone and frustrating as you indicated above.
Rolling distros solve both those problems! They are amazingly stable, too, at least the Arch derivatives I know of.
Come on, Ubuntu is Ubuntu for a reason, is the most reliable and stable distribution.
I doubt. Do you have some scientific data to back that up?
BTW, Ubuntu has dropped to nro 4. in DistroWatch popularity list. Antergos is about to pass it and it will drop to nro 5. ... for a reason!
I guess many Ubuntu users made their distro choice some 15 years ago when Ubuntu was new and cool, then stopped following the advancements made in other distros.
A good part in Ubuntu was a nice netinstall image that fitted in a CD and could be used for old i386 machines ... but now they dropped support for i386. WTF!
The problem is that the debs are low quality and they interfere with the one shipped by Ubuntu, it is a versioning problem.. You should use fpcupdeluxe and that's it, it will work great and Lazarus installed by it will not interfere with the one shipped or installed from debs.
FpcupDeluxe is an advanced geeky tool, not meant for "normal" installations. If you must use it to get FPC/Lazarus into Ubuntu, then Ubuntu clearly is not good for FPC/Lazarus users.
The .deb packages provided by Lazarus project are good and valid but they are for Debian, not for Ubuntu.