In Ubuntu, apt-get dist-upgrade does not upgrade to new release. It has just &quot;smart&quot; dependency resolution. I&#x27;m using it to upgrade kernels from command line, because normal apt-get upgrade won&#x27;t upgrade them. If you want to upgrade entire distribution from a command line to a new one, you have to run &#x27;do-release-upgrade&#x27;.<p>I was asking what you clicked, because at least in the main&#x2F;normal&#x2F;unity version, the upgrade isn&#x27;t offered to the user. I was wondering why and after a bit of googling, I&#x27;ve found that statement about waiting for 16.04.1 before flipping the switch.<p>About alternatives: if your grandma can live without bleeding edge packages and third-party ppas, I think that Centos is a good alternative. Once installed, it will run for years. There&#x27;s also Fedora, which looks nicer and more polished, but you have to go through pain of upgrading at least once per year (basically just like non-LTS Ubuntu).<p>GRUB: nomodeset disables KMS, that&#x27;s why it is not default. Do you have an Nvidia card?