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I love when new updates are available, it makes me feel productive! But really, rolling release in production use is a little scary. It greatly increases the o

I love when new updates are available, it makes me feel productive! But really, rolling release in production use is a little scary. It greatly increases the odds of something potentially going wrong in a routine update. I wouldn't mind more frequent releases, such as quarterly maybe; but this worries me a bit. I have a lot of trust in the Ubuntu team to be thorough in their testing, but we are all fallible and this is going to cost me some peace of mind.

nailer 16y ago
I can update the included web browser on Windows or OS X without waiting six months and it hasn't affected my stability thus far. thats the kind of thing I imagine Ubntu would be fixing here - shipping a currrent firefox, new drivers, etc, rather than changing glibc versions.
- meastham 16y ago
  There are a lot fewer factors in shipping a new firefox for OS X than there are for Linux. On OS X, for the most part, all of the important dynamic libraries are frozen at a single or at one of a small number of versions, everybody is either ia32 or amd64, there aren't distro patches applied to things, there isn't the wide array of Desktop Environment configurations that there is in other Unixes, etc, etc. This isn't to say that rolling releases aren't possible; it's just trickier for Linux distros. Also, you have to update the glibc sometime.
  - nailer 16y ago
    Ubuntu is primarily ia32 or amd64 too - there are no PPC, MIPS etc builds on http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/alternative-download http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/alternative-downloa.... The issue stopping Firefox releases for Ubuntu is that AFAICT Firefox don't bother packaging their app for Ubuntu and Ubuntu wait six months to do their own packaging. Indeed, you have to update to a major version of glibc every few years, but I imaging most people's hardware will die first.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >update the included web browser on Windows or OS X without waiting six months You can already do this in Ubuntu and variants by adding a ppa (personal package archive?). Also, at least on Kubuntu, the 6 month cycle isn't preventing releases that bork a lot of peoples systems. Latest one was broken from the off as not all files were uploaded to the archives and then the nVidia drivers clashed with the desktop clock (!).
  - nailer 16y ago
    Yes, but PPAs are unsupported third party unsupported software. Now Dell/Canonical support won't help your mum fix her laptop's browser.
lwhi 16y ago
I can't imagine it's so different to including third party repositories in your sources.list file.

nailer 16y ago

I can update the included web browser on Windows or OS X without waiting six months and it hasn't affected my stability thus far. thats the kind of thing I imagine Ubntu would be fixing here - shipping a currrent firefox, new drivers, etc, rather than changing glibc versions.

meastham 16y ago
There are a lot fewer factors in shipping a new firefox for OS X than there are for Linux. On OS X, for the most part, all of the important dynamic libraries are frozen at a single or at one of a small number of versions, everybody is either ia32 or amd64, there aren't distro patches applied to things, there isn't the wide array of Desktop Environment configurations that there is in other Unixes, etc, etc. This isn't to say that rolling releases aren't possible; it's just trickier for Linux distros. Also, you have to update the glibc sometime.
- nailer 16y ago
  Ubuntu is primarily ia32 or amd64 too - there are no PPC, MIPS etc builds on http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/alternative-download http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/alternative-downloa.... The issue stopping Firefox releases for Ubuntu is that AFAICT Firefox don't bother packaging their app for Ubuntu and Ubuntu wait six months to do their own packaging. Indeed, you have to update to a major version of glibc every few years, but I imaging most people's hardware will die first.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>update the included web browser on Windows or OS X without waiting six months You can already do this in Ubuntu and variants by adding a ppa (personal package archive?). Also, at least on Kubuntu, the 6 month cycle isn't preventing releases that bork a lot of peoples systems. Latest one was broken from the off as not all files were uploaded to the archives and then the nVidia drivers clashed with the desktop clock (!).
- nailer 16y ago
  Yes, but PPAs are unsupported third party unsupported software. Now Dell/Canonical support won't help your mum fix her laptop's browser.

lwhi 16y ago

I can't imagine it's so different to including third party repositories in your sources.list file.