[ubuntu-za] People sticking to LTS?

[Peter Nel]

I was just wondering why people think that LTS releases are better than
regular releases.
I'm convinced regular/current releases are as stable as LTS, if not more so
since it has most of the development and support focus.

Think of it his way... the 'current' LTS 12.04 will be supported until
April 2017!! Do you really want to be stuck on an old system until then? I
don't think Any software company can realistically maintain software that
long, especially on the desktop. Perhaps Canonical can see to most of the
OS level issues, but I don't think they can guarantee stability with ALL
packages that run on it, since they don't have control over all of them.

As a developer I can appreciate keeping a Server LTS's that long; services
and back-end processes will keep chugging along: web-, mail-, file-servers,
proxies, firewalls, cloud platforms, and so on. But servers are headless
and don't have a graphical user interface. The user graphics space adds a
TON of extra complexity to the system (Xorg and above) ... at least double
that of a server. Different multitasking user-centric use-cases
intersecting with different drivers, like audio, graphics cards, webcams,
mic's, keyboard+mouse, bluetooth, wifi, video codecs, etc.

I don't know. I just can't imagine staying on kernel 3.2 for 4 more years,
especially when several of my past problems were solved by kernel upgrades
which only came with OS release upgrades (-or if you like pain, manually
compiling kernel sources).
Current Ubuntu 13.04 is already on kernel 3.8 -- that's hundreds of
thousands (if not millions) of lines of code since 3.2... including
drivers; 3.2 is an old kernel (8th long-term stable release from March 2012
to 2016). Canonical is unofficially supporting it until April 2017 (next
LTS)... 3.8 is also already old (also EOL, End Of Life), only supported by
Canonical until August 2014. Current official stable kernel is 3.10 (10th
long-term stable release for 2 years).

http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/16/linux-kernel-development-numbers/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Development

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases#Table_of_versions

And that's just the kernel... consider the thousands of other packages.
Only in the large-scale distributed free software model is this possible to
even work at all. No single company in the world can manage this level of
complexity or rate of change (Canonical included)... unless you take
shortcuts, and create inorganic lock-in or code freeze.

I guess my initial point was that whilst a release is in it's active
support cycle, it can be considered as stable as any other release in its
active support cycle, whether LTS or not.


Cheers & enjoy the long weekend!
Peter Nel
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