So now I have all three computers in my household running Artful. Which everyone assumes will come out as 17.10 in a few months. The issues haven't been too major but the latest big issue is installing it on computers like mediapc with the problem that it has with the two screens with different resolutions. Whereby I have had to file a bug report on Launchpad. This is actually the reason why I gave up trying to upgrade it in place, because when it got to 17.04, the screen was all messed up and I couldn't figure out how to fix it at that time. So I tried the mini install of Artful Core, which had other significant issues (failing to load kernel modules), so I had to download the full install image for 17.10 and install it from a DVD (although a pen drive probably would have worked. Then after install I had to hook the RAID-1 array back on like on mainpc and then reinstall Samba to share the media volume like before.
The main issues when reinstalling software is that not everyone has an artful branch of their third party repositories. For Kodi I used the version that is already in the Ubuntu repositories, which is branded "Kodi by Debian". In the case of Qgis I followed the steps listed on the Qgis website for the development build, and then configured sources.list to use the zesty branch of the repository. On mainpc this has resulted in Qgis updating itself through several different master builds as new ones are produced. On all three computers video hardware is natively supported by Xubuntu, although the radeon chip in the bedroom pc is significantly more limited in performance than the NVidia 210 cards in both the other computers. I think the issue with the radeon chip is probably from the change in AMD driver architecture in Ubuntu of late and that the open source drivers are significantly compromised. I have found that higher bit rate mp4's really struggle on the radeon. It may well be that in time I will look to replace the motherboard in that computer with the Asrock Q1900 mini ITX board, since Intel video chips are well supported with open source software, but it is not a high priority at present with my limited funds.
I have been running development versions of Qgis forever as well. Some of the latest versions on Linux have been more difficult to work with; there seem to be some architectural limitations in the software that restrict the maximum number of layers in a project. I doubt Linux itself has this limitation as it is used to handle serious data with big servers and high end software in graphics and audio processing. The Windows version of Qgis is more reliable and I have kept it as a backup option both on my Windows computer and in a Windows virtualbox, but for now running an older development version in a Linux virtualbox is what keeps me sane as I work towards winding up the project at the end of this year.
