The amended release of those ISO images had the promise not to brick those laptop computers and it was released this year. It appears that certain brands of laptops like Acer, Dell, etc. were bricked at the BIOS scale in which they were not able to boot.
So much controversial mistakes until now probably came from Intel and the other tech companies after the fact that the patches against Spectre and Meltdown either caused certain computers not to boot or suffer something else like BSOD on AMD computers affected by those faulty patches but that's an on-going story for another time. Before those vulnerabilities were discovered by the public, there laid a bug affecting the Intel SPI driver which rendered those laptops unbootable. The amended release of Ubuntu 17.10 had disabled the driver and its official warning says that it should not be enabled unless you what you're doing as doing so can overdrive the SPI flash. The worse thing is that those laptops can be simply bricked with the live boot whether it's USB or the DVD disc of Ubuntu 17.10 prior to the amended release.
There may be solutions to undo the damage but the worst case scenario is that THE ENTIRE MOTHERBOARD WILL HAVE TO BE REPLACED! So, if you want to update or upgrade something, how can you make sure that none of the patches tampers with the hardware component at the motherboard level? If this is how they make patches or upgrades available like that with motherboard tampering, there will be a serious lawsuit against them and their reputation can be affected! What about Intel? Are they aware of this serious issue?
Another important thing is that Ubuntu 17.04 was already out of support and to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 at this time will be no easy feat. I don't know what the future Ubuntu versions may contain after seeing this news on various tech sites like Softpedia and OMG Ubuntu, etc. The same kind of concern may take place in MacOS and Windows as well in addition to Linux. Not to mention the patches that will require altering something at the motherboard level like the BIOS-level hardware component for instance, are NO PLAYTHINGS. Applying those will be no easy feat even when there's a serious technical situation that is another story of another time. What about the computer magazines containing Ubuntu 17.10 in the optical discs? Well, the publishers of those magazines couldn't be blamed when things stated above already happened enough. There may be great things about every future version of Ubuntu but certain versions have already caused controversies and this one has caused a more serious controversy than the other versions of Ubuntu that did so.
Lastly, for the enterprises, if everything is okay with the patches, they should be ready to go level-by-level with the critical-level being the production environment. But before you plan to deploy those patches, you may as well wait to see if there's any bad news regarding them. It may probably take days, weeks or even months should there be any bad news. The example of a bad news for patches is that they may render the computer unbootable at either the OS-level or even worse, the BIOS-level as if the BIOS itself is tampered with.
