[ale] Ubuntu recommendations

[Ron Frazier]

This thread's a bit old but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.  The guys 
over at the Going Linux podcast http://www.goinglinux.com/ seem to say, 
from accounts from listeners, to not do upgrades.  There is obviously a 
debate, and people have different experiences.  I was running another 
version of Ubuntu a while back, which I think was 9.04.  I tried to 
upgrade to the next version and something that I needed broke.  At the 
time, I wasn't using it much so I just went back to Windows since I dual 
boot all my machines.  Later, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 with a fresh 
install by wiping out the Linux partition and am still using it.  I've 
noticed the upgrade to 10.10 prompt but haven't bitten the hook.  If you 
adopt the "never upgrade" philosophy, then you'll be doing fresh 
installs every 6 months unless you use the LTS releases.  For me, fresh 
installs, regardless of being Windows or Linux, are very tedious, 
because there are many dozens of little settings and tweaks to the 
system that I do, plus installing user apps, that take about a week to 
get through.  I don't like doing them.  So, for now, I'm still with 
10.04.  There are two other reasons I'm not upgrading.  Firefox 4, which 
broke almost all my nice status bar apps when I installed it on Windows, 
so I immediately reverted back to the older version.  Then, there's also 
Unity, which I ranted about before.

Sincerely,

Ron

On 5/12/2011 2:17 PM, JD wrote:
> On 05/12/2011 12:56 PM, Chris Fowler wrote:
>    
>> One thing that confuse me is when I get this warning "Partial Upgrade
>> Required".  Does this mean that updates are no longer available for
>> 10.04 and I now have to go somewhere in between 10.04 and 11.04?
>>      
> Figured a different point of view could be helpful.
> I've been running Ubuntu systems the last 5 yrs or so.
>
> If you have/start with an LTS, then you can stay with LTS upgrades.
> 8.04 -->  10.04 -->  12.04
>
> At any point, you can switch to 6 month releases. 8.04 -->  8.10 -->  9.04
> -->  9.10 -->  10.04 -->  10.10 -->  11.04 ...
>
> However, you may want to switch file systems or other infrastructure
> things along the way that is best performed through a fresh install.
> Sometimes the upgrades on the non-LTS stuff can be rough.  Also, I've
> found non-LTS releases to be less stable.  For example, Natty desktop
> running Unity-3D or even Unity-2D won't stay up more than a few days
> here.  My 10.04 desktop AND servers only go down when I ask them to due
> to a kernel update.  I'm still running about (15) 8.04 LTS servers here
> too which will continue to get patches until May 1013 or later. I didn't
> look it up. Those are all rock solid and fully patched.
>
> Support for "desktops" is shorter, perhaps 2 yrs?  Servers using LTS
> releases are supported/patched for 5 yrs.
>
> There is a downside.  At a certain point support becomes only security
> related updates. That means you won't see FF4 on 10.04 in the Ubuntu
> default package repos. You can find a PPA or grab the .DEB file and load
> it, however. OTOH, if you're running an old server, chances are it is
> for a reason.
>
> For servers, I like to be at least a few months behind and only use LTS
> versions.
>
> For desktops, I'll stay a few months behind, but will try out the latest
> release inside a VM or 5.  Having a newer desktop release means that all
> those web-2 apps are probably updated and working. On 10.04, Gwibber
> stopped working for me with twitter, but still works for Identi.ca.
>
> Before switching to Ubuntu, I used Debian, SUSE, RedHat, Slackware ...
> back to 1993-ish.
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-- 

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Ron Frazier

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