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Ubuntu Wonderful?
Ubuntu Wonderful?
Posted Mar 26, 2008 19:07 UTC (Wed) by oak (subscriber, #2786)In reply to: Ubuntu Wonderful? by mikov
Parent article: First look at Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" beta (ZDNet)
> Truth be said, I haven't had the dubious pleasure of installing Vista or upgrading to it. Fortunately my involvement with Windows ended in the XP days :-) Anyway, you don't have to upgrade Windows XP to Vista every 6 months ... So I think my coworkers are comparing Ubuntu upgrades to installing a Windows service pack. I had understood that service packs are mainly security updates, so they would be closer to single Linux release security updates than upgrading to a new release...? > In practice one is much better off using Debian Etch instead of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. We use Etch on our development machines (our development is 100% Linux based). I feel the same, Etch picked better time for the release in regards to Desktop versions etc. > 8.04 LTS is probably a much more attractive and viable version, but the important thing is that our confidence in Ubuntu has already been destroyed. Well, I would think anything changing things that fast would have some quality control issues. I think the 6-monthly Ubuntu releases could be considered "unstable" ones although Canonical doesn't exactly advertise them as such. Let's hope their process gets this new LTS release good enough quality (and there's more response to bugs in their BTS).
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Ubuntu Wonderful?
Posted Mar 27, 2008 6:58 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Windows service packs are not just security updates (those come out in monthly patches) - they do roll these up, but they also include many other bug fixes and some new features, e.g. Windows XP SP2 included many IE features, a new firewall, improved WiFi/Bluetooth, etc. See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/features.mspx So I think it's reasonable to compare an Ubuntu release with a Windows service pack, except that the Ubuntu release will typically upgrade many bundled applications to new versions, and even change them to alternative versions in some cases, as well as providing new system features. Debian is great for servers but I would not want to have to customize it for a desktop user population, unless they are Linux developers who will just do this for themselves. Ubuntu is definitely easier to install than Windows (as long as WiFi is supported), since you don't usually have to install any third party drivers as with Windows.