16.04 sad release in my experience and from what I've read many others also

[gold_finger]

I have tried other flavours with the 16.04 kernel and all have been absolutely sad, system lock ups, system acting like it has a memory leak, constant reboots to get performance back to something less than woeful, even then it's slow.


Am I the only one?

From what I've seen on forums, no you're not the only one to experience problems.  With new releases come new kernels and not all kernels will work well with your particular hardware -- so it's pretty common to see a certain percentage of users have issues with any new release.  But, yes it does seem from casual observation that the percentage of people experiencing difficulties is a bit higher than normal on releases based on Ubuntu 16.


I haven't yet tried LL 3.0 or 3.2 (other than in Virtualbox), but I have installed Mint 18 Xfce on four machines.  The only major issue I ran into on all of them was that two processes would occationally startup and cause extremely high CPU useage.  On the two oldest machines the systems would essentially grind to a halt while those processes ran.  On the newer two machines it would cause very noticeable slowdown in performance.  The two rogue processes were apt-xapian-index and gvsfd-smb-browse.  Fortunately, with a bit of searching, I was able to find a way to solve the problem with them and have not had any other serious issues since.


The two old machines (both 2002 single-core Intel P4's) seemed to be fine after fix, but a bit slow due to them being ancient (2002).  I did OEM installs of Mint to them so their new users can setup their own user accounts and passwords on first boot and donated the two of them to a charity.


The two newer systems (2009 Intel dual-core and 2011 AMD Phenom II quad-core) are both running very well and I haven't experienced any other problems in the few weeks I've been running them with Mint 18. 


NOTE:  I'd expect that all 4 machines would have run similarly well if I had put LL 3.0 on them.  With LL's additional tweaks it may have performed slightly better than Mint on the old 2002 P4's.  If there were an "OEM" install mode for LL I probably would have installed that instead of Mint.