Comment 5 for bug 1025488

Which is why I stepped down to the ATI/AMD 12.4 driver which had previously worked is that I don't really have the time to play "throw darts on the wall" with drivers at the moment to see which works. If 12.10 doesn't work because of something lame like a drive, it's off the menu regardless of how polished it may be.
12.04 (sort of ) works OOTB, but the 'updated' driver set on 12.04 does not. OOTB, 12.10 is a complete fail for me.

While I do appreciate Ubuntu (and other 'nix variants are not Windows) I am pretty sure a motherboard from 2011 should work with a modern 'nix distro.
My laptop based on 4 year old hardware happily runs Sabayon (Linux kernel 3.5) or the latest Gnome Ubuntu. They are very different machines. One fails completely, the other works like a charm post upgrade.

A user, irrespective of technically ability, should be able to expect their operating system to continue to work after an upgrade. The upgrade should give a serious hardware check before doing anything that may hamper that user's chances of being able to do anything post upgrade.

It has it's own issues but Sabayon is far better in this respect because rather than dumbing down the updates/upgrades, there is a box which basically says "if you do X, Y may happen. Z may be an option and here is more information". This is where Rigo (Sabayon's GUI software installer) totally flattens Ubuntu's both the Software Centre & Update Manager. But that is just my opinion. I may not be able to use it, at least I know I am unable to do so. So time is not wasted against dumbed down upgrading which just breaks things.

Finally, To see if this was avoidable or if the video card was compatible I looked up the Certs page to see what alternative pieces of hardware might be an option. Ubuntu's hardware cert pages which used to be great, seems to be dumbed down and listed for down to brands. If you're lucky, the pointless Community hardware search which might give you a irrelevant bit of user info.

Oh well, I'm pretty sure this will be written off as a dupe or NOF or something along those lines..