Thanks for taking the time to respond to my frustrated report, Joao.

> If your old computer still survives another 3 years then you'd need to switch to another linux distro when that time comes.

I know that now. I learned the hard way. My error report is about the fact that I had to learn the hard way. 

> Also regarding the full root partition (IDK why you'd want to separate all those parts, /home /root /tmp /usr /var) but if you really want to then it seems you need a harddrive with more space.

Again, I should not have to clean my /root partition out of junk left by the installer and upgrade routines. They should clean up their own junk or give me a <yes or no> option to do it when it gets full, instead of leaving me to search forums and learn how to clean up their mess on the command line when it overfills my /root partition.

The point is that a little light reading about partitions will advise separation. Such reading is prompted after so many years of routine ubuntu upgrades creating havoc - after those upgrades were done at the click of a button and a prompt from the software updater: "New version available - Upgrade Now!". This action was always hopeful , no matter how many times it had caused problems in the past, because it was done in the hope that a new installation would magically clear away the host of errors that were characteristic of that most recent version. These were not deal breakers, because I'm still here, loyally filling my evenings with bug reports.

So after all this, and having spent more time than I would rather spare looking in forums to deal with errors, you learn that having a separate /home partition might be a good idea, because they say in the forums that you can do an upgrade and restore some semblance of sanity with a separate home partition if it all goes wrong. It does of course turn out to be not quite so straightforward. But my need to protect my data and not have days and weeks of time, both personal and professional, lost to dealing with errors, has kept me conscious of this issue.

Thus when Xubuntu 12.04 offered a helpful way of having sepatate partitions as part of an apparently foolproof graphical installation routine, I obviously jumped at the chance. The promise was that I could keep my applications and data intact, and have perhaps two different installations running on the same machine (we are talking about the desktop now, but desktop practices leak onto the laptop), so if anything happened to one, I would not actually have any downtime, and I could deal with the upgrade crisis at a time convenient to me. The forums and official documentation all over the place bangs on about the merits of having separate /home and /root and whatever other partitions. The Xubuntu installar even does it all automatically.

Then when it goes wrong you get some smarty pants developer saying you shouldn't have done it in the first place.

And then after all this, you learn your machine is not being supported any more and you've got to go find a different distrubution. Oh the life of a user. It's like being an S&M gimp.

> Also if you're too pressed for time and don't want to spend hours/days solving problems, know that you can get commercial support for any of the ubuntu distros.

I tried the commercial support. It was a waste of money.

Please listen, Joao. I'm not here writing bug reports for the fun of it, nor because I like letting off steam. This my contribution. Don't give me your platitudes. It's broken. Listen.