LTS on Desktop Often an Illusion [LWN.net]

LTS on Desktop Often an Illusion

Posted Jan 1, 2008 17:35 UTC (Tue) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498)
In reply to: LTS on Desktop Often an Illusion by roblucid
Parent article: Kubuntu LTS and KDE4

"Progress is simpler and less painful via many small steps."
This couldn't be more true. Anyone who has maintained a gentoo system will have learned that a frequent, regular upgrade schedule keeps the system much more maintainable over the long run then doing big huge upgrades all at once when a lot of different things could break in the process.

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LTS on Desktop Often an Illusion

Posted Jan 2, 2008 3:05 UTC (Wed) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]

The initial paragraph wasn't too clear, but the comments on the End of 
Life SuSE release in http://lwn.net/Articles/263153/ explain the 
conundrums and illusion of desktop support, with just security updates, 
3rd parties may not release fixed binaries which will work.

I think the Gentoo updates (as well as Debian) will work better done 
regularly, simply because that's what the updates are tested with.  A 
new "Release" causes much more trouble, because it has to support the full 
system upgrade, between high impact changes.  Frankly even just tracking 
security patches in more traditional update models, it's wise to check 
them out on "sacrificial" systems.