Ubuntu should focus its marketing on LTS versions | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu should focus its marketing on LTS versions

bits.quintanasegui.com

19 pointspqs15 comments

So there were a few issues with rolling out a new release. Is that really worth a big fuss on the blogosphere? I still haven't upgraded to Snow Leopard because I have heard about all sorts of issues. If you are worried, wait a couple of months before you upgrade (that goes for any vendor, not just Linux). If not, just upgrade away.

It very much is. Canonical purposely picked a release date to coincide with that of Windows 7. The Ubuntu community practically marketed this as the Second Coming and The Age of Linux (redux). And then they blew it.

Remember, it's the first impressions that count. Always. Someone who's hardware is wholly unsupported under the default Ubuntu configuration, crashing the PC or fscking up the display isn't going to try Ubuntu - or any other Linux - again anytime soon.

That's not to say that Ubuntu isn't a great distro. But like the article says, if you're going to market something, make that the best you've got. You don't enter a championship with your mediocre offerings when you've got loads better. Ubuntu can do, and indeed in the past has done, better so why this and why now?

Initial impressions == does it work or not. How badly is it going to mess up my existing configuration. How does the upgrade go. Is my hardware supported.

NOT initial impressions == how many windows you can wobble at once. Having the latest (and buggiest) version of framework X just for bragging rights or the need to get it out regardless of quality. Testing extensively under very limited conditions and barely for any of the slightly-out-of-the-mainstream cases.

EDIT: Wow, seem to have really struck a nerve to have reached -4. Would love to know what the downvotes are for, or if it's just a knee-jerk OSS reaction because I think I explained my POV quite well (whether you agree with it or not).

"Someone who's hardware is wholly unsupported under the default Ubuntu configuration"

It's nice if Linux supports as much hardware as possible, but to demand that it supports ALL hardware seems over the top. If you want to run Linux, check for hardware compatibility BEFORE you buy stuff.

I don't think Windows 7 supports ALL hardware? OS X for sure doesn't. If W7 supports all hardware, hats off to MS. Actually I think supporting all the weird hardware out there was a major achievement Microsoft did not get enough credit for (back in the days). Apple never even tackled that monumental problem.

Also, check for incompatibility:

http://www.leenooks.com

For instance, it's well known that nvidia stuff doesn't work as well as Intel, because Intel is involved with the production of free drivers, whereas Nvidia dumps out a binary driver once in a while.

(I run that one as a community service - if someone wants to help with the design, it would be more than welcome!)

This is such a "two years ago" argument. My upgrade to Karmic was much easier than Hardy or Jaunty (I didn't try out Intrepid). Heck, it was even better than my upgrade to snow leopard.

But that's just the point! This was your pleasant experience. I'm happy for you, really am. But not everyone else was as lucky, and therein lies the problem for the newcomers! Hope you get what I'm trying to say, that it's the under-appreciated stuff that knocks out one guy out of 10 that's the source of all the commotion here.. except, with good reason.

But that's also the experience of a certain percentage upgrading from Windows 2000 -> XP -> Vista -> Blah. The rule for Windows used to be "always reinstall, never upgrade, it never works 100%"; TBH, I'd have trouble believing better than 75% real success-rate.

The perfect upgrade is impossible (i.e across all user's machines); my experience has been only Debian and Gentoo come anywhere near close to painless, but to be fair, that's probably mostly because I'm constantly doing micro-upgrades on these dist's (Deb "testing" track) and there are still some app's or packages that haven't been tested into oblivion by the time I get to them, and so require me to troubleshoot and fix on occasion.

If you care about stability more than being near upstream's head, you have to choose an LTS dist, and you have to vett every single upgrade the Vendor/Maintainer wants to apply. If not, accept that there's a percentage risk which you have little control over.

One of the reasons you've been downvoted is that Canonical did not "pick a release date to coincide with that of Windows 7." Ubuntu releases on April and October of every year. They've done this since the inception of the distro.

In this community downvoting someone into oblivion for getting a detail wrong in a non-trollish comment is out of place.

I didn't do any downvoting. I only suggested a possible reason why.

I disagree. I feel that this goes against the principal of "release early, release often". You want a lot of people using the latest release of your software so you can get an idea of where the bugs lie before your next version.

Besides that, what this blog is basically advocating is turning Ubuntu into Debian. Perhaps there's a reason why Ubuntu is getting all the attention that Debian isn't getting?

And no, it isn't "marketing". That's almost always a cop-out answer.

I disagree with you.

It doesn't go agains release early, release often, as all geeks and early adopters will continue upgrading every six months, detecting bugs and improving the distro.

In fact, Ubuntu already does what the article says, the article just advocates a change in emphasis.

De article is not advocating turning Ubuntu into Debian. There are no PPA in Debian, so staying with an old distro really means using old software. With Ubuntu LTS+PPA, people would use solid software for everything except for thos programs that need to be upgraded more often.

I second your point, it's about running to strategies in parallel: release every six months for early adopters, but limit mainstream efforts to every to years. Which would make a lot of sense IMHO.

From what I can tell, mainstream users don't care about having the latest software, they just want it to work. I've helped people migrate to Ubuntu who were still using Win98...

I wish they kept the applications more up to date in the LTS version though, I keep adding new sources and installing .debs to get newer versions, for instance of OpenOffice, LifeRea or Pidgin.

But often, people _do_ want the latest versions of software. Remember when Firefox 3 came out a month or so after Ubuntu did? Everyone was stuck on FX2 for 5 months. Forums were filled with "omg I type apt-get upgrade firefox and I still don't have FX3, wtf???/"

There are no PPA in Debian, so staying with an old distro really means using old software.

Debian has http://backports.org/ ("Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it is possible) on a stable Debian distribution.")

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