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What does LTS mean to you? Is it _support_ you want? Is it interfaces not changing for many years? Is it not having to worry about upgrades? Something else?

by mattdm 10y ago

pzone 10y ago
Not having to worry about upgrades. Major upgrades cost time, energy, and effort. I don't want to expend energy on it. I don't think playing sysadmin is a good use of my time.
coreyp_1 10y ago
Specifically, I hate doing upgrades, and when I manage multiple machines, I don't want the headache of continuously breaking the development flow just up update to a "supported" version, after which I have to learn a new interface, etc. Even worse is if I have to ask individuals to update their own machines... there is a day (at least) of lost productivity! In fact, this is the main reason that I have stuck with Ubuntu despite the fact that I ABSOLUTELY ABHOR Unity. (Yes, I know that I can use a different window manager, and I do, but I also hate having to constantly re-implement the changes when upgrading, so I only use LTS releases.)
- mattdm 10y ago
  This is a pain point I hear about a lot, usually with the suggestion that we should do LTS or a rolling release. LTS is very expensive — and I think prohibitively so for our volunteer community. It's also at odds with our desire to get new upstream software to users quickly. You didn't mention rolling release, but I can get into that if someone wants. In any case, we definitely hear this and our approach is make upgrades as painless as possible. We've put a lot of work into this over the last few releases, and the feedback right now is very positive; I'm seeing a lot of "wow, that only took 10-15 minutes" on twitter from beta upgraders. From the command line, it's one command to prep the update another to reboot into the offline update itself, and then you boot into the upgraded system. When F25 final is out, users of earlier releases can even launch this from the Software GUI, just like a regular security update. As for UI changes... I think GNOME 3 has really settled down here, and most changes you see will be minor tweaks and usability improvements. As of Fedora 25, there's no longer version checking for extensions — we expect them to just keep working for the most part. That's both a result of increased stability in the shell interface itself, and a sort of stability feature in itself.

What does LTS mean to you? Is it _support_ you want? Is it interfaces not changing for many years? Is it not having to worry about upgrades? Something else?

by mattdm 10y ago

What does LTS mean to you? Is it _support_ you want? Is it interfaces not changing for many years? Is it not having to worry about upgrades? Something else?

pzone 10y ago

Not having to worry about upgrades. Major upgrades cost time, energy, and effort. I don't want to expend energy on it. I don't think playing sysadmin is a good use of my time.

coreyp_1 10y ago

Specifically, I hate doing upgrades, and when I manage multiple machines, I don't want the headache of continuously breaking the development flow just up update to a "supported" version, after which I have to learn a new interface, etc. Even worse is if I have to ask individuals to update their own machines... there is a day (at least) of lost productivity! In fact, this is the main reason that I have stuck with Ubuntu despite the fact that I ABSOLUTELY ABHOR Unity. (Yes, I know that I can use a different window manager, and I do, but I also hate having to constantly re-implement the changes when upgrading, so I only use LTS releases.)

mattdm 10y ago
This is a pain point I hear about a lot, usually with the suggestion that we should do LTS or a rolling release. LTS is very expensive — and I think prohibitively so for our volunteer community. It's also at odds with our desire to get new upstream software to users quickly. You didn't mention rolling release, but I can get into that if someone wants. In any case, we definitely hear this and our approach is make upgrades as painless as possible. We've put a lot of work into this over the last few releases, and the feedback right now is very positive; I'm seeing a lot of "wow, that only took 10-15 minutes" on twitter from beta upgraders. From the command line, it's one command to prep the update another to reboot into the offline update itself, and then you boot into the upgraded system. When F25 final is out, users of earlier releases can even launch this from the Software GUI, just like a regular security update. As for UI changes... I think GNOME 3 has really settled down here, and most changes you see will be minor tweaks and usability improvements. As of Fedora 25, there's no longer version checking for extensions — we expect them to just keep working for the most part. That's both a result of increased stability in the shell interface itself, and a sort of stability feature in itself.