Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop To Be Supported Longer

[ninez]

Good move Canonical,

But i still would never use Ubuntu, not as my Desktop, and certainly not for a server or workstation.

my own workstation; Archlinux 64bit

my workstations @ work; CentOS 6
my linux servers; Centos 5/6 (upgrading the 5s to CentOS 6 very soon).

I've never found Ubuntu to be as good as it's sometimes cranked up to be. I've always found it to be buggy, bloated and unreliable. okay, maybe to tool around with, but not very suitable for actual production. That being said, i think extending the LTS will prove over time to be a good move For Ubuntu.

Now they really need to re-think the 6month release cycle (which I think sucks, and is why i stopped using distros that have that approach). I can't imagine (anymore!) using a distro, that doesn't use the rolling release model. It is much much better.

[Iksf]

Great move imo the recent releases have had way more new features and way more new bugs than previous releases, hopefully this will really make 12.04 a ultra solid release to then innovate upon in 12.10 and 13.04

[chithanh]

It will be impressive when they support a release for 13 years.

Who does this?

Maybe that was a reference to Microsoft, with Windows XP that was released on 2001-10-25 and EOLs on 2014-04-08.
Or Windows Server 2003, supported from 2003-04-24 until 2015-07-14 according to Wikipedia.

[madbiologist]

It will be impressive when they support a release for 13 years.

Who does this?

[madbiologist]

This will be great for people who wish to avoid Wayland.

[Rambo Tribble]

Yes, yes, yes

I'm so happy I could just compute. Of course, my joy is predicated on the assumption that 12.04 will prove substantially better than 10.04 at actually running on existing hardware. Since 8.04 there hasn't been a release of comparable stability and compatibility.

[nepwk]

It doesn't matters if the distro is supported for three or for five years in case the level of this support is far from perfect.

As a matter of experiment I had installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on the workstations of the one of the clients my company provides IT outsourcing services to. Can't say that this experience was terrible but the amount of work we had been forced to do in order to fix some annoying bugs was noticeably bigger then the usual post-install experience for CentOS/RHEL. Most annoying bugs for our clients that weren't fixed in "LTS" up till now:
1. Plymouth hang at startup in case system is trying to do the filesystem check. This bug is "declared" to be fixed but actually it is not. Reports to launchpad about it being not fixed are merely ignored.
2. Various pulse-audio issues. Most of them are well-known PA and/or alsa-plugins bugs that had been fixed in fresh releases. This fixes are not being backported to LTS release. We have to proceed with stripping out PA from LTS installation and take all the burden of reconfiguring systems to use alsa/dmix.
3. Firefox and Thunderbird support. Fast release cycle for this major OSS products implies that there would be ~6 major releases during the LTS support time frame. This fact is being simply ignored. We have to use thrid-party ppa's to install fresh versions of Mozilla products.

This being said, I'm excited that another linux distro had come to a road of extending LTS support - now we would be able to offer our corporate client more options when it comes to long-term OSS OS installations.

Totally agree. I've deployed Ubuntu on plenty of desktops and servers, but I've avoided the LTS's, and just opt for the latest release that is, from my personal experience, stable. At the risk of being called a heretic, I don't really care about getting updates, I'd rather turn off updates than risk borking a production server or workstation with one.

This has been my lifetime experience with Ubuntu:

8.04 - turd
8.10 - good
9.04 - turd
9.10 - good
10.04 - OK, with a few bugs that just ruin it
10.10 - good
11.04 - good
11.10 - pretty good, but previously stable drivers seem to have gotten worse

Hopefully 12.04 turns out good, but it seems like the Linux kernel has been going through a rough period after 2.6.38. I've tested recent Linux 3.1 RC's, and it seems to be even worse than 3.0.

[lexa2]

It doesn't matters if the distro is supported for three or for five years in case the level of this support is far from perfect.

As a matter of experiment I had installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on the workstations of the one of the clients my company provides IT outsourcing services to. Can't say that this experience was terrible but the amount of work we had been forced to do in order to fix some annoying bugs was noticeably bigger then the usual post-install experience for CentOS/RHEL. Most annoying bugs for our clients that weren't fixed in "LTS" up till now:
1. Plymouth hang at startup in case system is trying to do the filesystem check. This bug is "declared" to be fixed but actually it is not. Reports to launchpad about it being not fixed are merely ignored.
2. Various pulse-audio issues. Most of them are well-known PA and/or alsa-plugins bugs that had been fixed in fresh releases. This fixes are not being backported to LTS release. We have to proceed with stripping out PA from LTS installation and take all the burden of reconfiguring systems to use alsa/dmix.
3. Firefox and Thunderbird support. Fast release cycle for this major OSS products implies that there would be ~6 major releases during the LTS support time frame. This fact is being simply ignored. We have to use thrid-party ppa's to install fresh versions of Mozilla products.

This being said, I'm excited that another linux distro had come to a road of extending LTS support - now we would be able to offer our corporate client more options when it comes to long-term OSS OS installations.

[bwat47]

This is a good move if they want to make any headway with business users.

[yogi_berra]

Supported longer than Debian supports their releases...
Wow.. just wow...
.

It will be impressive when they support a release for 13 years.