Ubuntu 11.04 is going to be named the Natty Narwhal
markshuttleworth.com
markshuttleworth.com
I'm not sure, however, what the big differences are between releases on the server side (lots of improvement on desktop, sure). All I see is slowly growing memory footprint but little performance gains or other benefits. Anyone have a thought?
The main reason to upgrade Server, though, is to get access to a new generation of packages which are considered stable. The stuff you get in 8.04, while reliable, is getting long in the tooth features-wise.
I'm always stoked for new releases of Ubuntu even though I don't really use them much at all (except on servers). Is there any real reason to keep up a release cycle like theirs when you can just update the apt repositories?
Especially for the LTS releases, you want to be able to get security fixes without wondering if there's some backwards-incompatible change to stuff you use.
Is there any major Linux distro that doesn't use a release cycle of some sort? If there is, you'd have to be mad to use it for production environments.
You are aware that VLC does work on Mac, right?
First off, if you are installing mid-way between two releases you basically have 3 months before your distro is obsolete. I just put 10.04 on my laptop in July and already I'm thinking about upgrading again (which has not always been smooth, 9.04->9.10 sucked), and I haven't even gotten around to my desktop yet, and now I just decided to wait until 10.10 because why bother doing it now? So I'll still be on 9.10. It becomes a hassle for users after a while. I remember when I was downloading the release on the night it came out and updating my machine, but the releases these days are less and less noticeably different.
I also wonder if they could accomplish more in 9 months than in 6, some percentage of time is spent doing overhead for each release and a slower release schedule would allow them to bite off bigger chunks. 6 months made a lot of sense when it was a new project and there were a lot of low hanging fruit, but these days I feel like the path forward requires bigger steps and more time.
You don't need to update to the latest version every time - the 18 month support window for non-LTS releases is pretty decent. It means that they can have a quick release cycle to get support for new hardware out fast and get a fresh round of attention for each new release while not obsoleting old installs too quickly.
And if, like many people here, you feel the need to upgrade just because there's something new, odds are there'd be something else shiny demanding your attention anyway!
If you were deploying Ubuntu company-wide and had custom desktop software, you'd want an LTS release on the desktop too, for the same reason.
Stability versus agility is a trade-off. In some cases it makes sense to pick a fast-moving platform. In others it makes sense to pick a slow-moving one. With the combination of a six-monthly release cycle and three year support on LTS releases, Ubuntu gives you both platforms to pick from.
"This is where Ubuntu Backports comes in. The Backports team believes that the best update policy is a mix of Ubuntu's security-only policy AND providing new versions of some programs. Candidates for version updates are primarily desktop applications, such as your web browser, word processor, IRC client, or IM client. These programs can be updated without replacing a large part of the operating system that would affect stability of the whole system."
We've started to replicate that as well. It works so much better.
Doesn't OpenSUSE have a 9 month schedule?
I'd never really use a x.10 build in production myself.