linuxgeek: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Downloading Problem

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Downloading Problem

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 8:30 AM, Linux Canuck <linuxcanuck@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>
> There are advantages to both upgrade cycles. Five years gives you stability and you do not have to worry about things not working for five years. Six month cycles give you the latest and greatest versions of the applications and kernel with drivers.

Just to blur the lines a little more, this is not entirely correct.

At some point later this year, 14.04.1 will release and will have a
slightly different kernel (no idea which yet).

Then in October, 14.10 will release with a new kernel, probably 3.15
or something along those lines.

Shortly after that will be 14.04.2 which will be build on the 14.10
kernel and graphics stack.

Then 15.04 will release in April of 2015

then 14.04.3 will release using the kernel from 15.04.

Point is, the LTS point releases will generally be based on the
kernel+SRUs form the previous release.

So 14.04.1 should probably be mostly 3.13 SRU fixes and such
and after that a new LTS point release will appear every six months or
so, shortly after a non-LTS release, and will be based on the kernel
and updates in the newest non-LTS release.

Generally, the LTS release is now looked at like the "Daily use for
everyone" release and the non-LTS releases are looked at more like
"Development/Bleeding Edge playground" releases. The non-LTS releases
will still be completely usable, but as Roy has said, support for
non-LTS (meaning updates and bug fixes) will cease after 9 months
while the LTS will continue to receive support for 5 years.

> Re-installation never scares me. Many experienced users actually prefer to do this than to upgrade. It gives you a fresh start.

True, very true... though personally I kinda like just upgrading
straight through until the upgrades finally break. Or until the next
LTS anymore. Heh... the best I did was to upgrade from 9.04 all the
way to 11.10 before I finally did a fresh install at 12.04 just
because I had accumulated so much cruft in my filesystem from all
those upgrades and abandoned packages I often forgot to clean up :)

There are tricks, and the number one trick is to have a separate home
partition. My setup is usually about 60GB for the root filesystem and
everything else goes to /home (with about 2GB for swap). That way I
can re-install from scratch with all my personal data in place and
safely tucked away on its own partition. That also comes in handy for
multi booting, unless you end up with conflicting config files or
other stuff.

Cheers
Jeff