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

Posted Jun 2, 2011 13:26 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
In reply to: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life by dgm
Parent article: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS ("Dapper Drake") end of life

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".