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I got the upgrade to Fedora 38 on my machines today too (although I see the official release was a couple days ago). I'm curious about who gets excited about a

I got the upgrade to Fedora 38 on my machines today too (although I see the official release was a couple days ago). I'm curious about who gets excited about and uses these non-LTS Ubuntu releases. It seems to me that the five-year LTS offering is the main reason to use Ubuntu, if you want stability and don't like Debian and don't need to pay for RHEL. If you want fresher, why not Fedora or an Arch derivative?

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Historically, it's been popular as a user-friendly desktop distribution, in which case updating semi regularly to stay on a current version makes perfect sense
- themodelplumber 3y ago
  Agreed, if you know how Ubuntu works fairly well, and want to maintain a relatively modern system feel, LTS might not even be the right track. I used to aim to upgrade to non-LTS plus an .01 or .02 at the very end, ideally. Moving to LTS later on as an experiment was extremely stable but I had to ask how much stability I really needed, as the excitement with my desktop was waning. :-)
ohgodplsno 3y ago
It's a jack of all trades with no very particularly weak points, that allows me to just work. I'm done fucking around with config files because oops Arch wants to install glibc-alpha-rewrote-in-haskell. Want a recent kernel ? Ubuntu is relatively good at that. Want software that's more or less up to date, without needing the bleeding edge ? Their repos are good at that. Not in the repos ? You can probably add-apt-repository something and you'll be good to go. Need a reliable DE ? Gnome is fine. Hate Gnome ? It's alright, there's a KDE and Xfce version too. What's that, you want snaps ? Yeah, it's there. Flatpaks ? There too. Is more or less Debian compatible, which is pretty much the only distro you can expect people to properly package for ? Gotcha. Weird setups like Optimus that end up being broken in most places ? Works just fine. Proprietary nvidia drivers ? Sure. I'm done fucking around for hours getting Arch to not be crap, or Fedora to not use fucking pacman, give me apt. I just want a work distro that will handle 99% of what I throw at it without any issues.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> and don't like Debian why might somebody not like Debian?
- linsomniac 3y ago
  The primary reason I'm using Ubuntu rather than Debian is the LTS. I know the general consensus is that "Debian is as stable as Ubuntu LTS", but we are still working on upgrading our 18.04 boxes a few months ago. We can't change all of our platforms as quickly as Debian retires old releases. Especially not while also doing our other operations work. In some cases we can just lay down the new OS and run Ansible and we're good, but in other cases porting to new OS releases can take months of effort.
  - warner25 3y ago
    I thought Debian releases were good for the same five-year lifecycle. I expected the answer to the parent's question to be Ubuntu's support for non-free things out-of-the-box.
    - linsomniac 3y ago
      I don't really understand Debian LTS, I know they more recently, meaning maybe in the last 5 years, talked about increasing the support cycle, but if I go to https://wiki.debian.org/LTS https://wiki.debian.org/LTS it says "current LTS supported until 2024, future LTS supported to 2026. There is then some "Extended LTS" that has further support, saying "adding another 5 years to the existing 5 years", which is commercial and probably something I'm not going to be able to sell over using Ubuntu LTS.
vegabook 3y ago
May sound trite, but Ubuntu feels more visually polished than any other distro. It's clearly in the Canonical DNA to actually care how stuff looks design wise which is an otherwise major failing across the other distros. After all I'm staring at this stuff all day long.
- tapoxi 3y ago
  I really think Fedora has caught up in this regard. The only real visual difference between the two at this point is the dock.
rcarmo 3y ago
I upgraded all my machines to 38 today (I stopped running Ubuntu on desktop due to snaps), _except_ servers (which are all Ubuntu LTS except hypervisors). I tend to stick to Ubuntu LTS on servers and never try .10 releases, let alone interim years...
selivanovp 3y ago
In my experience regular Ubuntu releases are still more tested and polished than Fedora or any Arch derivative. So it’s generally safer to use if you want to drive more fresh versions of kernel and graphics stack. They’re not perfect though, some of them were pretty horrible over the years, like 11.04. The current 23.04 has also several gnome and mutter related bugs that are not critical, but annoying.
wink 3y ago
Not excited and actually not updating right now, but for a desktop install I do see people going every upgrade. Speaking couch laptop here, I usually upgrade when the new LTS release is out, sticking out the full 4-5 years on a desktop is a thing I only know from universities and corps. I personally mostly stick to LTS and then add any package via nixpkgs where I either want the absolute latest version or want some sort of decoupling from the distro package manager but still not build on my own.
- warner25 3y ago
  Yeah, this is about what I was thinking; not that most users would go the full five years without upgrading, but that they could, and that every two or three years with a new LTS release would be what most non-Fedora, non-Arch, desktop users would want.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Historically, it's been popular as a user-friendly desktop distribution, in which case updating semi regularly to stay on a current version makes perfect sense

themodelplumber 3y ago
Agreed, if you know how Ubuntu works fairly well, and want to maintain a relatively modern system feel, LTS might not even be the right track. I used to aim to upgrade to non-LTS plus an .01 or .02 at the very end, ideally. Moving to LTS later on as an experiment was extremely stable but I had to ask how much stability I really needed, as the excitement with my desktop was waning. :-)

ohgodplsno 3y ago

It's a jack of all trades with no very particularly weak points, that allows me to just work. I'm done fucking around with config files because oops Arch wants to install glibc-alpha-rewrote-in-haskell. Want a recent kernel ? Ubuntu is relatively good at that. Want software that's more or less up to date, without needing the bleeding edge ? Their repos are good at that. Not in the repos ? You can probably add-apt-repository something and you'll be good to go. Need a reliable DE ? Gnome is fine. Hate Gnome ? It's alright, there's a KDE and Xfce version too. What's that, you want snaps ? Yeah, it's there. Flatpaks ? There too. Is more or less Debian compatible, which is pretty much the only distro you can expect people to properly package for ? Gotcha. Weird setups like Optimus that end up being broken in most places ? Works just fine. Proprietary nvidia drivers ? Sure. I'm done fucking around for hours getting Arch to not be crap, or Fedora to not use fucking pacman, give me apt. I just want a work distro that will handle 99% of what I throw at it without any issues.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> and don't like Debian why might somebody not like Debian?

linsomniac 3y ago
The primary reason I'm using Ubuntu rather than Debian is the LTS. I know the general consensus is that "Debian is as stable as Ubuntu LTS", but we are still working on upgrading our 18.04 boxes a few months ago. We can't change all of our platforms as quickly as Debian retires old releases. Especially not while also doing our other operations work. In some cases we can just lay down the new OS and run Ansible and we're good, but in other cases porting to new OS releases can take months of effort.
- warner25 3y ago
  I thought Debian releases were good for the same five-year lifecycle. I expected the answer to the parent's question to be Ubuntu's support for non-free things out-of-the-box.
  - linsomniac 3y ago
    I don't really understand Debian LTS, I know they more recently, meaning maybe in the last 5 years, talked about increasing the support cycle, but if I go to https://wiki.debian.org/LTS https://wiki.debian.org/LTS it says "current LTS supported until 2024, future LTS supported to 2026. There is then some "Extended LTS" that has further support, saying "adding another 5 years to the existing 5 years", which is commercial and probably something I'm not going to be able to sell over using Ubuntu LTS.

vegabook 3y ago

May sound trite, but Ubuntu feels more visually polished than any other distro. It's clearly in the Canonical DNA to actually care how stuff looks design wise which is an otherwise major failing across the other distros. After all I'm staring at this stuff all day long.

tapoxi 3y ago
I really think Fedora has caught up in this regard. The only real visual difference between the two at this point is the dock.

rcarmo 3y ago

I upgraded all my machines to 38 today (I stopped running Ubuntu on desktop due to snaps), _except_ servers (which are all Ubuntu LTS except hypervisors). I tend to stick to Ubuntu LTS on servers and never try .10 releases, let alone interim years...

selivanovp 3y ago

In my experience regular Ubuntu releases are still more tested and polished than Fedora or any Arch derivative. So it’s generally safer to use if you want to drive more fresh versions of kernel and graphics stack. They’re not perfect though, some of them were pretty horrible over the years, like 11.04. The current 23.04 has also several gnome and mutter related bugs that are not critical, but annoying.

wink 3y ago

Not excited and actually not updating right now, but for a desktop install I do see people going every upgrade. Speaking couch laptop here, I usually upgrade when the new LTS release is out, sticking out the full 4-5 years on a desktop is a thing I only know from universities and corps. I personally mostly stick to LTS and then add any package via nixpkgs where I either want the absolute latest version or want some sort of decoupling from the distro package manager but still not build on my own.

warner25 3y ago
Yeah, this is about what I was thinking; not that most users would go the full five years without upgrading, but that they could, and that every two or three years with a new LTS release would be what most non-Fedora, non-Arch, desktop users would want.