Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 11:44 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link]

It's very much apples to oranges because, as was alluded to in the mail, the five years of support for an Ubuntu LTS release is only for server components. Support (such as it is anyway) is only three years for the desktop.

XP end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 12:27 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link]

Support for XP was revived when MS realized that Vista was never gonna fly on netbooks and Asus were selling loads of EEE running Linux. Otherwise it'd be dead by now.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 13:20 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (6 responses)

And RHEL provides support for up to 10 years:
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 13:37 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (5 responses)

Redhat actually cares about the trailing / in their urls on access.redhat.com. Here is the proper url:
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/

RHEL 3 will be supported until: October 31, 2013

Also note that (unlike ubuntu) RHEL updates for desktop packages are also for the full lifecycle of RHEL. When you look at it like that, it makes you wonder if Ubuntu is even trying to get into "serious business" markets like finance and banking or whatnot.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 15:53 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (4 responses)

And you can extend Red Hat support with a few years at SUSE Linux :D

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 16:00 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (3 responses)

How do you figure that?

http://support.novell.com/inc/lifecycle/linux.html

The difference is that you don't have to worry about Redhat going almost bankrupt and getting bought out later :)

Will they actually support SLES in 10 years? Who knows.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 3, 2011 9:14 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

My mistake, I thought support lasted longer than that after some slides I saw recently. And https://expandedsupport.com/ mentions 3 year contracts for extended support to RHEL 3...

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 3, 2011 12:09 UTC (Fri) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (1 responses)

No worries thats a scam^Wgimmick to try and get you to migrate from RHEL to SLES eventually. Clearly it isn't working for them :)

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 5, 2011 11:29 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

I guess they do want you to migrate to SLES eventually, although, SUSE Manager has support for both and this was upstreamed to Red Hat as well.

And to what extend it isn't working I don't know (I'm no sales guy*) but I do hear SUSE is growing it's market share so at least it works a bit :D

*note that I work for SUSE, although I'm pretty much exclusively busy with openSUSE

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 13:26 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (10 responses)

How much software is there in Windows XP (compared to that in Ubuntu 6.06 main)?

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 14:21 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (9 responses)

And that would matter because...?

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 16:20 UTC (Thu) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link]

Because that is an indication of how much work it is to support the software for so long. Supporting XP vs supporting a whole distribution is several orders of magnitude in difference.

In to that Ubuntu had to support 5 other versions of it's distribution at the same time. This with different versions of the software in each distribution. And they do it free of charge.

To that I would also add that releasing Service Packs for XP is completely different user experience from getting patches since the Service Packs often change behavior of the current software and also introduces new functionality, I would say that MS has a very long way before they can give enterprise support similar to that of say Red Hat.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 20:07 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (7 responses)

Windows XP support (supposedly) includes the base operating system and utilities (i.e., all user applications which came on the WinXP CD-ROM or storebought computer). In contrast, Ubuntu's support includes the whole distro, including all the various user applications. This is likely an order of magnitude more software than WinXP.

Presumably, Microsoft has a separate support lifecycle schedule for its Office suite, PC-based games, and other programs sold separately from Windows. MS probably also has a separate schedule for various releases of Internet Explorer (even though it is "bundled" with the OS).

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 20:12 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (1 responses)

> MS probably also has a separate schedule for various releases of Internet Explorer (even though it is "bundled" with the OS).

To be fair, this is only because of Firefox, a threat they resurrected the dead IE team to fight. ;)

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 5, 2011 2:36 UTC (Sun) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

Well, I was referring to bug-fix and security updates, but yes, you make a good point about IE having to be more innovative (with wholesale version upgrades) once the real threat of competition showed its face...

Of course, nowadays there's more competition than just Firefox—Opera is still around (and actively supported), Google Chrome is making headway, and Apple's Safari is present (in the proprietary OS arena).

I find it wildly ironic that Apple seems to be pushing Safari for Windows whilst MS yanked IE for Mac. Go figure...

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 20:39 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

ubuntu is probably several orders of magnatude larger than windows.

In addition, what microsoft supports isn't winXP as it was released 10 years ago, they support the version as of the latest major service pack, which changes enough stuff that if it were a linux distro it would probably rate a new version.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 3, 2011 0:19 UTC (Fri) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (3 responses)

Ubuntu's support includes the whole distro

The whole server distro; no desktop stuff. So that's no X, no Gnome, no OpenOffice, no Firefox etc. That makes it rather a lot smaller.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 3, 2011 8:38 UTC (Fri) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, that means it only includes Apache, lighthttpd, squid, GCC (C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Fortran), GDB, Valgrind, Eclipse?, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, PostgreSQL, MySQL, CVS, SVN, Arch, Darcs, Hg, Monotone, vi, emacs, jed, nano, ssh(d), plus at least another 5,000 packages.

Yeah, sure that's smaller than Windows XP. /sarcasm

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 3, 2011 11:50 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

The point about the desktop stuff still stands, though. For 8.04, which does offer long-term support for the *Ubuntu* desktop stuff as far as I am aware, the same thing does not apply for Kubuntu. In other words, the KDE packages don't enjoy that same level of support: something I found out when reporting bugs; not something that you can readily find out when browsing the Ubuntu Web sites (at least last time I checked).

Oh, and I once tried upgrading an installation from 6.06 LTS to 8.04 LTS (having installed from 6.06 media which was the only thing I had lying around), and after being instructed to use some Ubuntu-specific tool (apt-get not being enough, apparently), the thing decided to give up on the idea. That would worry me if I were still using 6.06.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 3, 2011 23:41 UTC (Fri) by chad.netzer (subscriber, #4257) [Link]

He clearly meant "rather a lot smaller than the Desktop version", or "rather a lot smaller than it otherwise would be", not "rather a lot smaller than XP".

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

Posted Jun 2, 2011 22:38 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

If Microsoft had stopped supporting XP 5 years after it was released, it would have been hugely problematic, because they hadn't released a newer version of Windows at that time. If you count from when a replacement was available, and reject Vista as a replacement (as many people did), XP is only almost 2 years out of date, as opposed to 3 for Dapper Drake. Even with Vista allowed, XP is only 4.5 years out of date. Also, if you consider service packs to be releases, the currently-supported XP was only released 3.5 years ago.

It gets to be just a mess to compare if you actually try looking at how frequently you have to make how significant a migration in order to still be in a maintained configuration.