Walt

Win95 blue screened? I thought it just kicked back to DOS, which is what it lived on top of. It still ran in real mode correct?

Actually, I would not use 12.04, which actually is a very stable release I use on my non-laptop systems. Canonical is about 2 weeks away from releasing 14.04 which also is an LTS release. Before choosing between those two look at some of the You Tube vids on 14.04 desktop, i.e. 9 best features. What they've done is hardened Unity, made command windows stretchable, shipping it with IceHouse (which is the latest Openstack release for those interested in doing some private cloud hacking. Mostly they've really improved and hardened the UI. I am not sure if this is where Touch is General Availability (GA) I believe so though. Touch is the smart phone version of Ubuntu. This is why they've been working on hardening the Unity UI. The other point is virtually every release, certainly every LTS release there is this huge jump in user friendliness and stability. I have a Dell XPS 15Z laptop and 12.04 just didn't work correctly on it, 13.10 works great. I am waiting for a tablet that can run 14.04, that will be totally outstanding.