I’m doing okay with 16.04, running the rev-75 kernel. Once it starts up, it’s good. I only had to reboot 3 times this morning to get past some … stuff that systemd thought was needed. I’d really like for Ubuntu-MATE to boot up the same way every time. When things are lucky, it takes maybe 3-4 seconds to get from grub to login, and everything is working fine so far as i’ve used things. [Haven’t used bluetooth for months, not sure if i’ve ever used it since installing Ubuntu-MATE.] But it is kind of a PITA to have to reboot your laptop 3 or 4 times to reach the login screen; something is broken, when you power up your system and it acts different each time, something is just flat broken. And since 16.04 is an LTS release, isn’t it limited to security fixes or something?
I’m not sure what level of fixes one ought to expect. I tried 17.04 but didn’t get past much because i didn’t have my reading glasses and it was displaying text at some absurd resolution like the native resolution of this laptop which is 3200x1800. But once a linux version is “out”, it’s basically nearly frozen, except for a lot of updates like firefox and language translation, at least that’s how it looks to me.
There are times when i’m stumped on something, i’d be able to at least test and report bugs if that didn’t get me hooked on some black-hole time-sink, but i looked the other day for something with nightly iso builds but wasn’t very determined in my digging, seeing as how occasionally i get something figured out and want to code it up before it evaporates.
I can always just suspend it while i’m not using it, but i believe that does still use some battery for dumb things like polling the lid switch or who knows what, but i prefer storing li-ion batteries in a disconnected state, just in case one decides to go melty.