Hacker News Reader

Comment by karlmdavis | Hacker News Reader

As a couple of other folks have mentioned, it’s important to keep in mind that the premise of that original post was, "what could Ubuntu do better?" In that context, what you DON’T see there are the things that Ubuntu does well already, but that folks feel might be lacking in Fedora.

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that a HUGE part of the reason I stick with Ubuntu are their LTS releases. Those are just super important to me: more than most anything, I value a desktop that I don’t have to overhaul/reinstall on a frequent basis. Ubuntu’s five years of support puts it way out ahead of Fedora’s one.

(As a developer, I of course need to stay more up to date than the LTSes themselves are, but that’s what /usr/local/ is for. It’s trivial to keep those things up to date myself, and frankly, even Fedora would be too slow for me with most of that.)

[Note: I also cross-posted this comment on the blog itself.]

View on HN

Doing an LTS release is every expensive, and since the bulk of Fedora is done by community volunteers rather than 9-to-5 packagers, it's not something we can really fairly ask.

One of the funny things we often get is "Fedora should be LTS. Or rolling-release!", which is odd because these things are generally at complete odds — no change, or constant change.

We think we have a better approach: consistent, quality-checked releases which it's easy to upgrade between. Personal anecdote: I just updated my system to F26 Alpha — started the process, went to lunch, came back and found it done. No hit to my productivity.

And, as I just mentioned in another post, we're working on another thing, [Modularity](https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/), which will allow us to provide consistent applications and interfaces across those releases.

I totally get that -- and it's a perfectly reasonable stance. Every distro doesn't have to be all things to all users. Yay for distro choice!

But I'd keep my more general point in mind, too: that thread had the wrong question and the wrong audience to answer the "what should Fedora do?" question. You might try to start a similar, separate Fedora-specific thread in a few months and see what feedback you get. I'd bet it'll be significantly different.

I actually _did_ several months ago (with a desktop and developer-audience focus): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703836

I would assume LTS and rolling releases align for some people due to impact on the user. LTS gives a long time between impacts, rolling releases spread the impact out over time. I could see every-n-months releases to hit a bad spot of too frequent for the size of the impact for some people.

I can see that. The overall message, though, is people want less negative impact from upgrades, and there are multiple ways to address that, of which LTS and rolling-release are only two of the possibilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com