taking Unity to the next level

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 4 March 2013 16:35, Ted Gould <ted at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> For some derivatives that may be the case, but it would seem for Kubuntu
> specifically Canonical now has vested interest in keeping the Qt stack
> working really well and will start to pick up work that has been done by
> Kubuntu-devs previously free'ing time to working other more KDE specific
> stuff.  I don't know, seems like a golden time for Kubuntu to me.

I don't know; a rolling release next month doesn't seem to me to be a
golden time for Ubuntu or the flavors. I'd like the ability to
recommend a reasonably stable Ubuntu with the latest GNOME stable
release. For GNOME 3.8, this was scheduled to happen next October (for
13.10). Now it sounds like we can recommend users either run an LTS
with a new GNOME release every 2 years or they could try running the
daily build. Those running the daily build have little protection from
a broken upload so that's a very scary idea to me. Personally I've
been running the Ubuntu development release for years now, but it's
the early adopter non-developers that will be hurt badly by this
especially in the first six months.

If we fail to keep the development release mostly stable, then
Ubuntu's standing will be hurt as most major distros release once or
twice per year, not just once every two years. Ubuntu will be taking
on a lot of risk if we push the rolling release too quickly. I want to
be able to recommend the non-LTS Ubuntu to any of the "power users" in
my LUG but until we have the capability to hold a huge potentially
disruptive update (like GNOME 3.6 > 3.8 or a new X stack or a new
kernel, etc.) for at least a few days first, I won't be able to
recommend they use anything but the LTS or another distro.

Since currently much of the featured Ubuntu desktop uses GNOME
components, it's not feasible to backport new GNOME releases without
breaking parts of the Unity experience. This seems to put Ubuntu GNOME
in the same bad position as Kubuntu.

Jeremy