Debian 9.0 "Stretch" Planned For Release In Three Weeks

[Geopirate]

Ubuntu needs to sell to businnesses that so far defaulted to GNOME (classic), wayland support is irrelevant.

You could absolutely make the argument that Wayland support is irrelevant today. They have to support Ubuntu 18.04 into 2021 and it will matter a lot more at that time if they are using a DE with good Wayland support from upstream vs partial support with a ton of patches.

[carewolf]

Why is that? Isn't unstable supposed to not be affected be the stable release and only testing gets frozen, or am I getting something wrong here?

Unstable it just the bleeding edge of the next stable release. So when the release freeze kicks in, it stops taking in new major versions of software until the release is stable enough to be tagged stable. Testing is just a time-delayed unstable in order to catch any oopses in unstable.

[dungeon]

Debian comes in three distributions.

Actually four - Old-Stable and maybe five - LTS

If people are happy with these and is still supported there is no reason to upgrade... Or if you have a reason then you have a reason , it is up to the user to decide, Debian 7 has 1 more year of support and 3 more years for Debian 8.

Even beyond that is possible but not recommended, as if someone don't mind about security issues it can be used forever Debian releases are like that - conservative design and self contained. Of course once it *is* released and the best once release ended - then it is top notch archived

[moilami]

The exciting part is that we finally get new stuff into unstable and testing again after a 6 month draught during the release winter.

Ah, well, indeed, I don't feel so adventurous anymore, so will "freeze" my comp to Strech and wait for a serious reason to upgrade it to testing again

[waxhead]

As a new to this, with "stretch" they mean a pre-release ? And if so, how long usually takes for the official stable release ?

Debian comes in three distributions. Unstable, Testing and Stable. (there is a experimental repo as well , but let's not complicate stuff).
Debian also uses code-names for the distributions. The code-names are based on characters from the Toy Story movies.

Unstable is permanently named SID (The unstable kid in the Toy Story movies)
Testing is presently named 'Stretch'
Stable is presently named 'Jessie'

This is how Debian works:
1. Packages are stuffed in the unstable repo.
2. Packages in the unstable repo will migrate to tesitng if a certain set of requirements are fulfilled (https://www.debian.org/devel/testing)
3. At some point the testing distribution is freezed for transitions, and only bugfixes are accepted.
4. When the testing repo is considered stable it is simply renamd stable.

So why do Debian use these aliases? Well, if you for example use Stretch instead of Unstable in your apt.sources list you will sooner or later end up in the stable repo.
If you instead use testing you will forever stay on the testing distribution. This has benefits , for example it allows you to do an early upgrade to what you think is stable enough (Stretch) and remain there when Debian announce stable. If you use testing instead of the codename you will forever be on the testing distribution.

Oh and by the way.... Debian is great

[starshipeleven]

As a new to this, with "stretch" they mean a pre-release ? And if so, how long usually takes for the official stable release ?

See the wikipedia table about debian releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian...#Release_table

Debian uses names taken from Toy Story, and Stretch was a rubber octopus http://pixar.wikia.com/wiki/Stretch

Only one that they won't use in releases is "Sid" (the kid that hacks up and destroys toys http://pixar.wikia.com/wiki/Sid_Phillips ) as that is used permanently for the development/unstable branch.

[trek]

As a new to this, with "stretch" they mean a pre-release ? And if so, how long usually takes for the official stable release ?

no, stretch is the name of the next Debian version that will be released in June

[starshipeleven]

Starship. Your claims are invalidated by the fact that Ubuntu will default to Wayland and develop its own session. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Gnome Classic works fine on Wayland too. and Afaik they sait they planned to stay close as upstream GNOME.

[Konstantin A.]

As a new to this, with "stretch" they mean a pre-release ? And if so, how long usually takes for the official stable release ?

[starshipeleven]

Also this may be a significant factor in Ubuntu choosing Gnome over KDE......

Ubuntu needs to sell to businnesses that so far defaulted to GNOME (classic), wayland support is irrelevant.