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18 months support is not long enough
18 months support is not long enough
Posted Oct 21, 2004 8:17 UTC (Thu) by addw (subscriber, #1771)Parent article: Ubuntu Linux and the future of Debian
- commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and
technical support for every release
If you want to use this as the basis of a corporate desktop, 18 months is far too short, 4 years is probably the desktop requirement (servers need even longer support). This is something that RedHat & SuSE have understood. Note that the 18 month clock start ticking from the date of release, a user will: download it, evaluate it and then start to roll it out to users (which will take some time); so they may only have 12 months support 'left' by the time that it hit user desktops.
I do understand that this sort of long term maintainance is expensive to provide, but remember that it is expensive/disruptive to have to upgrade/reinstall user desktops every year.
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18 months support is not long enough
Posted Oct 21, 2004 9:14 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]
The optimal deployment time for a corporate desktop operating system is a continuum. At one end, very frequent changes impose a continual small cost, especially to process documentation. At the other end, very rare changes impose an occassional large cost, especially for operator training.
The current Microsoft Windows release model is at one end of this spectrum. And corporate IT is currently optimised to support Microsoft's release model. But please don't be mislead into thinking that this release model is the only one which leads to acceptable results.
As an example of an alternative model, there are many school and university student labs which upgrade their OS versions once or twice annually, during the student-free periods.
For companies with an annual downtime, an operating system with a timetabled operating systems release may suit their operations better than the rare and indeterminate releases of Windows.
Other companies may decide that a continual trickle of small changes offers less risk than the occassional "big bang" with the implication of a the large number of vendor-specific security patches. It's also difficult to make long release cycles stick: some desktop users will have valid reasons for desiring later versions of applications than the one installed. So long release cycle strategies usually degenerate at the edges, whether this matters or not depends upon your own circumstances.
18 months support is not long enough
Posted Oct 22, 2004 2:56 UTC (Fri) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]
Note that on the website and most other places (although not in this announcement), we say that the distribution will be supported for <i>at least 18 months</i>. Don't be too surprised if it gets longer as time goes by. :-)