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Good job on the LTS, Canonical. I don't understand why they don't make the release cycle longer. Perhap 9 months or a year, or even just one additional month f

Good job on the LTS, Canonical. I don't understand why they don't make the release cycle longer. Perhap 9 months or a year, or even just one additional month for QA. I first started using Ubuntu, and Linux, when 9.04 came out and it was great. Since then the quality has steadily declined. 9.10 was good too, but ever since 10.04 every release has sucked. They can't even do LTS releases right. Sorry for ranting, but the Ubuntu team seems to fuck up time after time. Perhaps they should try focus on making their system stable, instead of adding more crap.

Kerrick 14y ago
LTS releases are supposed to do this. The six-month releases can be considered, for all intents and purposes related to stability, "testing" releases. The LTS releases are supposed to be stable enough for large-scale rollouts, with three years of desktop and five years of server support. In fact, Canonical upped the ante with 12.04--five years for both the desktop and server versions. Of course, plenty of things are supposed to be.
- saurik 14y ago
  If that were the case, then one would not expect any serious changes to be made in the actual final release from the one that precedes it, as the changes being tested by the six-month period get locked in as "this definitly worked". As that is obviously not the case, either the release process is flawed or your premise is incorrect. In fact, it seems more like the cycle is simply "don't make us support forever every single release", not "let's take a year and a half to test these changes before committing to them (which, to be clear, I'm fine with, although in practice it has meant that I always upgrade away from LTS anyway as it is often less stable, in a "will it lock up on me" sense, than the subsequent releases).
- teilo 14y ago
  LTS means one thing, and one thing only: That they will release security fixes for it for five years. It has nothing to do with stability and testing.
blahedo 14y ago
The real problem here is that the LTS cycle is synched with the six-month release cycle; so the LTS is simultaneously a "new" six-month release. It might make sense to say that the Even.04 releases are the "LTS beta" or maybe even the "LTS RC", and then make the real LTS release be Even.07 or so.
- kijin 14y ago
  The real LTS is called Even.04.1. Isn't it common knowledge that Ubuntu is often unstable in the first couple of months after each release?
onli 14y ago
First of all, LTS is no real LTS prior to the .1-release. All LTS-releases had serious issues at first, as far as i remember even dapper drake. Which is not even really harmful for an LTS, since corporations had no need to upgrade as soon as possible from the last LTS. Furthermore, the story of the declining release-quality was also said about 7.04 (pulseaudio was the issue, if i remember correctly), and edgy prior, end the one after feisty... hoary was nice, but it wasn't that good. 12.04 got - apart from this bug now - really good reviews and felt good on my laptop, so condemning canonical because of one bug seems inappropriate.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  > Which is not even really harmful for an LTS, since corporations had no need to upgrade as soon as possible from the last LTS. Not only that, but Ubuntu doesn't give you the option to upgrade until .1 is available. Trying to upgrade my 10.04 boxes reports that there's no new distribution yet.
getsat 14y ago
Since? 10.04 systems hang after 200+ days due to a kernel bug. If you install the latest kernel, which addresses the issue, after 200+ days processes still no longer report any CPU usage. 10.04 itself was a joke.
- insertnickname 14y ago
  Yeah, that was actually what I meant. Sorry for not expressing myself more clearly. 10.04 was a huge disappointment.
dimitar 14y ago
Ubuntu is just a distribution. They don't directly hack on everything they ship. This is why they try to keep up with the upstream which releases the new versions. They do it in fact less than Fedora, which may or may not be a good thing. Maybe if they get really big they can afford to slow down. To add my little Linux rant (as a stupid user): I installed Ubuntu 12.04 and I had almost everything I needed after a 15 minute installation. I prepared mentally for a battle with Skype. It actually worked really well. I toyed with gnome-language-selector and somehow my language got switched to Chinese. And then the 2 hour battle began. No matter what I did, my GNOME or Unity sessions stayed in Chinese. Ubuntu devs decided that I don't need to select the language at login, so I couldn't do it there, and the various locales didn't convince anyone except the shell that I don't want Chinese. Finally I opened again gnome-language-selector in which I couldn't previously select the language. Turns out I had drag and drop and not click the languages. So I had to pick up English and drop it above Chinese for it to work. I should have reinstalled Ubuntu - it would cost me less time. And I still have no idea why I had Chinese in the first place.
pbiggar 14y ago
Actually, I think they'd do a lot better by making the release cycle shorter. When Firefox changed their release cycle to be much much shorter, they got a significantly improved, much more stable product. The main reason was that instead of shoving everything that they wanted to release into it, features got released when they were mature enough to go in. I think this is something Ubuntu (and almost every other OSS project) could really learn from.

Kerrick 14y ago

LTS releases are supposed to do this. The six-month releases can be considered, for all intents and purposes related to stability, "testing" releases. The LTS releases are supposed to be stable enough for large-scale rollouts, with three years of desktop and five years of server support. In fact, Canonical upped the ante with 12.04--five years for both the desktop and server versions. Of course, plenty of things are supposed to be.

saurik 14y ago
If that were the case, then one would not expect any serious changes to be made in the actual final release from the one that precedes it, as the changes being tested by the six-month period get locked in as "this definitly worked". As that is obviously not the case, either the release process is flawed or your premise is incorrect. In fact, it seems more like the cycle is simply "don't make us support forever every single release", not "let's take a year and a half to test these changes before committing to them (which, to be clear, I'm fine with, although in practice it has meant that I always upgrade away from LTS anyway as it is often less stable, in a "will it lock up on me" sense, than the subsequent releases).
teilo 14y ago
LTS means one thing, and one thing only: That they will release security fixes for it for five years. It has nothing to do with stability and testing.

blahedo 14y ago

The real problem here is that the LTS cycle is synched with the six-month release cycle; so the LTS is simultaneously a "new" six-month release. It might make sense to say that the Even.04 releases are the "LTS beta" or maybe even the "LTS RC", and then make the real LTS release be Even.07 or so.

kijin 14y ago
The real LTS is called Even.04.1. Isn't it common knowledge that Ubuntu is often unstable in the first couple of months after each release?

onli 14y ago

First of all, LTS is no real LTS prior to the .1-release. All LTS-releases had serious issues at first, as far as i remember even dapper drake. Which is not even really harmful for an LTS, since corporations had no need to upgrade as soon as possible from the last LTS. Furthermore, the story of the declining release-quality was also said about 7.04 (pulseaudio was the issue, if i remember correctly), and edgy prior, end the one after feisty... hoary was nice, but it wasn't that good. 12.04 got - apart from this bug now - really good reviews and felt good on my laptop, so condemning canonical because of one bug seems inappropriate.

StavrosK 14y ago
> Which is not even really harmful for an LTS, since corporations had no need to upgrade as soon as possible from the last LTS. Not only that, but Ubuntu doesn't give you the option to upgrade until .1 is available. Trying to upgrade my 10.04 boxes reports that there's no new distribution yet.

getsat 14y ago

Since? 10.04 systems hang after 200+ days due to a kernel bug. If you install the latest kernel, which addresses the issue, after 200+ days processes still no longer report any CPU usage. 10.04 itself was a joke.

insertnickname 14y ago
Yeah, that was actually what I meant. Sorry for not expressing myself more clearly. 10.04 was a huge disappointment.

dimitar 14y ago

Ubuntu is just a distribution. They don't directly hack on everything they ship. This is why they try to keep up with the upstream which releases the new versions. They do it in fact less than Fedora, which may or may not be a good thing. Maybe if they get really big they can afford to slow down. To add my little Linux rant (as a stupid user): I installed Ubuntu 12.04 and I had almost everything I needed after a 15 minute installation. I prepared mentally for a battle with Skype. It actually worked really well. I toyed with gnome-language-selector and somehow my language got switched to Chinese. And then the 2 hour battle began. No matter what I did, my GNOME or Unity sessions stayed in Chinese. Ubuntu devs decided that I don't need to select the language at login, so I couldn't do it there, and the various locales didn't convince anyone except the shell that I don't want Chinese. Finally I opened again gnome-language-selector in which I couldn't previously select the language. Turns out I had drag and drop and not click the languages. So I had to pick up English and drop it above Chinese for it to work. I should have reinstalled Ubuntu - it would cost me less time. And I still have no idea why I had Chinese in the first place.

pbiggar 14y ago

Actually, I think they'd do a lot better by making the release cycle shorter. When Firefox changed their release cycle to be much much shorter, they got a significantly improved, much more stable product. The main reason was that instead of shoving everything that they wanted to release into it, features got released when they were mature enough to go in. I think this is something Ubuntu (and almost every other OSS project) could really learn from.