[svlug] My next computer and its support

[norm@dad.org]

I am a very old man, 84 years old.

I have been using RedHat systems and paying for RedHat support for nearly 20
years now. I am currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation release
6.8, on a very high-end workstation. I use if for program development (mostly
Java but some C and a little Perl, Bash, Python etc), for entertaintmenrt,
and for managing my life.

For me, Redhat problems are that:

        I haven't been able to get the latest versions of Chrome and Chromium
        to work under it.

        The paid support varies from really terrible, to mediocre, and very
        occasionally good.

        And the next version of it, RHEL 7, will use systemd instead of init.

              I know almost nothing about systemd except that using it will
              mean I will have to learn a lot of new stuff and that one of
              its authors is the author of the RHEL 6 sound system, which has
              given me endless grief. For those two reasons, I would like,
              all other things being equal, to avoid it.

I'm thinking of switching from Red Hat to Ubuntu, but have no idea how much
of an improvement, if any it would be. So I would like to know:

     Can the latest versions of Chrome and Chromium be easily installed on
     Ubuntu?

     Does Ubuntu use systemd?

     What kind of paid support is available for Ubuntu?

I would much appreciate any advice.

    Norman Shapiro