Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Great, if they only provided decent support for older versions. I'm using the LTS release on my desktop, but pretty much all software besides Firefox and Thunderbird are at least three months behind.

The LTS should be good till 2017, but it's already far behind in 2013.

View on HN

That's how Debian's release system has always worked, and most derivatives have stuck pretty close to it. If you want software pretty close to the day of its official release, use a bleeding-edge distro like Gentoo or Arch. If you want software literally the day of its release regardless of what your distribution's maintainers think of it or its compatibility, most distributions have testing channels where new packages are inserted as quickly as they can be built (for Debian, this would be sid).

Heh, well that's the point of the LTS release. It gets security updates and patches, but those releases are not designed to stay current.

If you want current software, don't run old releases.

I've encountered this sort of logic before. It is certainly one way of defining "long term stable" but a more useful definition is that packages go through more extensive interoperability testing prior to being made available, so they are 3 - 6 months perhaps behind the current stuff but not years behind.

It is perhaps one of the biggest challenges for me on a Linux desktop, constantly having to choose between 'everything works' or 'has current features'. Which is not a choice I need to make with commercial desktops.

It's not a choice you are given for proprietary desktops. New features are almost always the domain of point releases. The linux distros have just decoupled that so you know what you are missing if you wait.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com