Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Likely To Ship With Linux 5.4 As Opposed To 5.5

[Britoid]

Why anybody utitilize Linux Distros Like OpenSuse Tumblemweed or Fedora that are rolling release/Bleeding Edge unlikely Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS that these should be Fixed Release without packages freezing like OpenSuse Leap and CentOS

I think because those distros have never spent much energy advertising or portraying to be a generic desktop OS, they haven't needed to because their commercial versions, SUSE and RHEL, are both already commercially successful where as Ubuntu hasn't been (Canonical has spent more years in the red than not).

They're both brilliant distros and imho they do things a lot better than the Ubuntu, Debian etc (zypper/dnf throws apt out the water), it's a shame they're not suggested enough.

[LoveRPi]

Canonical did the right thing although some features will arrive slightly later. Keeping with Linux upstream LTS means good security patches. Looks like they finally listened to Greg KH.

[Danny3]

You can always install the newest kernel from https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ if you so desire... (there even is a simple utility named 'ukuu' for this)

Yes you can install the newest kernel, but you must expect stuff to break because of this.
I have already 2 softwares that have problems with it.
ROCm which is the worst, will actually refuse to install on Ubuntu LTS if you upgrade the kernel.
Virtualbox will not start the virtual machine complaining about some kernel module they use.
And these are only 2 that I need and found, I bet there are many more that have problems when you upgrade the kernel to something newer than what what they expect to be installed for that version.

[TemplarGR]

Ubuntu users are often as much obnoxious as Windows users.... Instead of admitting that their distro of choice has faults, they always claim "there is a ppa for that". Yes, ignoring the fact that once you begin using ppas everywhere your installation ceases to be Ubuntu and becomes something else. Something with less testing and more breakage. But of course they don't really care, they can always reinstall (like windows users do every once in a while), right?

If you have to use ppas, then what is the point of having an LTS in the first place? If your main software components are derived from an untested/not officially supported repository, you might as well use Debian Sid. The only thing you gain by Ubuntu is the easy graphical installation (a must have for those obnoxious windows-type people since they typically can't do anything in a terminal) and a nice default look and feel.

[tjaalton]

It'll be 5 years if you're willing to use 20.04 for that long. I wouldn't call that short. Anyway, I think Ubuntu and other LTS distros probably would have been able to patch Nvidia 390 to work with newer kernels as long as the changes between kernel versions weren't too radical.

Don't forget xserver updates, which break the video ABI.. and this time there might not be a separate HWE stack (with renamed binaries) for 20.04, so unless the xserver is frozen by the user, nvidia-340 would get uninstalled on upgrade. But it's still undecided if there's still going to be a separate stack or not.

[royce]

It is not like this will increase their workload by a lot, i mean most of the work they are doing between the 2 versions would be common, they would release the exact same LTS distro they are doing now but with a more recent kernel/mesa and other software. It is not a huge amount of work and people will get the benefit of both worlds.

Feel free to do this yourself if you think "it's not a huge amount of work".

[Guest]

Usual idiotic strategy of shipping with old software - on the other hand, AMDGPU in Linux 5.5 is pretty buggy for my R9 390. Here we go again, with broken support that won't be fixed for months.

[Guest]

Using LTS distros on new hardware or on non-enterprise desktop machine has never made sense. It probably doesn't help that Ubuntu recommends users install the LTS version, where they then experience bugs that have most likely been fixed and the whole Linux desktop gets a bad name.

Microsoft puts most users onto non-LTSC versions of Windows for a reason.

True. I've seen a lot of people recommending old distro versions (Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, heck even 12.04 because it worked well on something some years ago), for new hardware, especially with AMD GPU and other hardware vendors who provide very late support.

[royce]

Canonical's primary mission is now the server space. It's what pays their bills and their salaries. A choice like this basically alienates 1% of the user base with newer hardware, and for these you have two choices:

• use another distro that works for you
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds and https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archiv...aphics-drivers until HWE catches up with what you need

It's not like your ass is hanging in the wind either way. Be proactive instead of expecting Canonical or any other company to solve your problems for you.

[Guest]

all you need to do is wait for the next Ubuntu distro until you get a non-LTS one

So wait 6 months for my laptop to become semi-usable? People who use Ubuntu, are usually non-tech savvy users, and they're going to install on whatever consumer hardware they have, including recent releases. Which means for machines with Ryzen CPUs and AMD GPUs, they don't have hardware accelerated graphics for months, which makes it a huge issue.

There is NO justification for using old software - it's NOT anymore stable than new releases, no matter how many delusional people keep repeating that stupid idea. The only people who need LTS releases, are IT workers in an organization because they have to manage 10-1,000,000 computers, people maintaining servers (especially the ones running stock exchanges, hospitals, cities etc.)

Pretty much no one else.

I'm planning to use Ubuntu LTS myself, but only as a server, so that I don't have to maintain it as much and it'll keep running, On normal machines where I sit and use GUIs, web browsers etc. I'm definitely not going to use some old, outdated software.