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Sadly, the choice wasn't quite mine to make, so I had to follow the regular Ubuntu releases. What can I say, I looked at non-LTS releases and looked and looked

Sadly, the choice wasn't quite mine to make, so I had to follow the regular Ubuntu releases. What can I say, I looked at non-LTS releases and looked and looked but didn't see the beta marking and I thought they were actually production-ready... I used to run Debian stable at home a while ago and did like the stability, but the security update situation is not exactly something I'm happy with.

icebraining 10y ago
It's not that Ubuntu releases aren't production-ready, it's that no major OS releases are production-ready - hence Windows 8.1, and one of the reasons why Enterprise is still on 7. By using LTS, you get to skip that nonsense for years, and jump directly into a release which has had its kinks ironed out (or at least documented). As for Debian security updates, what do you mean?
- notalaser 10y ago
  There is a great deal of effort involved in backporting updates to frequently-updated packages. Debian, for instance, doesn't update WebKit (or at least didn't last time I checked, and had a policy for it). Consequently, things like Evolution (which uses WebKit internally) are a walking CVE museum on Debian stable. The situation is similar for a lot of other packages, on a lot of other distributions with long-term support (Debian actually has a large enough community of skilled enough developers that they're faring well in this regard). I don't want to minimize or belittle the work that they're doing, I only mention Debian because it's been my go-to distro for a very long time. They're also alleviating the problem in the most common use cases (e.g. they do update Chromium if you need a webkit browser). Codebases like WebKit's are simply too large, too complex and too quickly-shifting for a community-driven project to be able to backport fixes. Even where the codebase is small enough, backporting is a nasty business. I've seen it done commercially, so with proper funding and proper teams and whatnot, and the success rate is not something that I'd consider encouraging. I've shot myself in the foot while doing it, too. There are certain types of setups that lend themselves well to long-term support models. Server systems, up to a certain degree of complexity, embedded systems with a restricted set of packages -- maybe. A modern Linux desktop is not one of these systems IMO. A Linux desktop with four year-old packages is very likely to be very buggy in very nasty ways.
  - milesrout 10y ago
    Install Firefox then.

icebraining 10y ago

It's not that Ubuntu releases aren't production-ready, it's that no major OS releases are production-ready - hence Windows 8.1, and one of the reasons why Enterprise is still on 7. By using LTS, you get to skip that nonsense for years, and jump directly into a release which has had its kinks ironed out (or at least documented). As for Debian security updates, what do you mean?

notalaser 10y ago
There is a great deal of effort involved in backporting updates to frequently-updated packages. Debian, for instance, doesn't update WebKit (or at least didn't last time I checked, and had a policy for it). Consequently, things like Evolution (which uses WebKit internally) are a walking CVE museum on Debian stable. The situation is similar for a lot of other packages, on a lot of other distributions with long-term support (Debian actually has a large enough community of skilled enough developers that they're faring well in this regard). I don't want to minimize or belittle the work that they're doing, I only mention Debian because it's been my go-to distro for a very long time. They're also alleviating the problem in the most common use cases (e.g. they do update Chromium if you need a webkit browser). Codebases like WebKit's are simply too large, too complex and too quickly-shifting for a community-driven project to be able to backport fixes. Even where the codebase is small enough, backporting is a nasty business. I've seen it done commercially, so with proper funding and proper teams and whatnot, and the success rate is not something that I'd consider encouraging. I've shot myself in the foot while doing it, too. There are certain types of setups that lend themselves well to long-term support models. Server systems, up to a certain degree of complexity, embedded systems with a restricted set of packages -- maybe. A modern Linux desktop is not one of these systems IMO. A Linux desktop with four year-old packages is very likely to be very buggy in very nasty ways.
- milesrout 10y ago
  Install Firefox then.