Topic Change: Does everyone like the Koala

[Dave Hall]

On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 22:05 +1100, Norm wrote:
> You know,
> 
> This may sound a little like heresy, but is a new release every 6 months 
> sustainable? Or even necessary? Is it just me or is each new release becoming 
> just a little more buggy?
> 
> It just seems like they're coming out of a sausage factory with the casings not 
> quite tied off.  I keep going back to Hardy for a "good experience"
> 
> Perhaps an "update pack" every six months and stick with the current LTS 
> schedule for mainstream releases?

I see the non LTS releases as developer snapshot builds.  There are some
occasions where you will run them in production, like I am currently
doing with Karmic for the virtualisation improvements.

At the same time 80% of the boxes I have deployed in production
environments (desktops and servers) run LTS releases.  Why? because I
want it to be solid and don't want to have to upgrade every 6 months.  

The only machine which is regularly running alphas/betas/rc/just
released versions of ubuntu is my primary machine - my laptop.  It has
only completely died once - corrupted cryptroot on a karmic alpha
+updates. Why?  because if something is seriously busted I want to know
about it well before the version goes gold and also I like shiny stuff.

I do think that ubuntu and canonical need to review their marketing
strategy for non LTS releases.  I think that there is too much emphasis
on promoting them to Jo/e Average user, where most of them would be
better off on an LTS release.  Can you imagine that chaos in the retail
IT sector if MS released a new version of Windows every 6 (or even 12)
months?  

Cheers

Dave