Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha 1 released

These release cycles are just plain ridicolous. No wonder Linux has so little penetration into the business market.
 
risingtide said:
These release cycles are just plain ridicolous. No wonder Linux has so little penetration into the business market.
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Do you use Linux? Not much changes in the core, there is no demand for an upgrade to be done, and there are LTS versions of the server editions.

I am still using 8.04LTS for server, and 8.10 on desktop - would have been 7.10 if I had not gotten a new PC and thought "what the hell".

Linux - unlike that joke of an OS from Redmond - is backwards compatible for most uses.
 
Shuttleworth can continue doing this forever.. The last figures i saw showed that he had put less money into Ubuntu than he could earn in interest in a year
 
You also need to understand the release cycles, risingtide. It is described here.

I think this kind of support and commitment is laudable!

The Ubuntu release cycle

From its outset Ubuntu project has been committed to a regular release cycle and has managed to deliver on that commitment without fail. It is the regularity and reliability of these releases that makes Ubuntu a great option for users and businesses who can plan upgrades and new installs with a reliability that is very unusual in the operating system market. This diagram gives our long term commitment to releases and demonstrates the key difference between a Long Term Support release and our standard releases.

LTS Desktop and Server

Long Term Support releases for desktop and server. There are deployment platforms with wide hardware and software support and ideal or individuals and businesses making a longer term investment in Ubuntu

Standard release

These are the 6 monthly release that contain the best of the new from the Open Source and commercial worlds and suited to users happy to upgrade regularly.

Point Release

These are 6 monthly updates to the long term support cycle. These are primarily bug fixes and patches with occasional feature enhancements that maintain the integrity of the release over a long cycle. The point releases continue up to the next LTS release which then offers an obvious upgrade path for users

LTS Server

This is the extended support period for server.
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risingtide said:
These release cycles are just plain ridicolous. No wonder Linux has so little penetration into the business market.
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you seem to think that Ubuntu is Linux. Mandriva for instance releases one version a year (or at least they did last time I checked). Then you have the bastion of stability in Debian. Then you have the enterprise distros like Red Hat and SUSE. If you were informed on the subject matter, you would not be caught out as you have.

EDIT: And given that on Debian distros dist-upgrade is a fairly simple process it actually is not a negative having short cycles. And remember of course that in the rest of the world, bandwidth is not an issue.
 
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milomak said:
you seem to think that Ubuntu is Linux. Mandriva for instance releases one version a year (or at least they did last time I checked). Then you have the bastion of stability in Debian. Then you have the enterprise distros like Red Hat and SUSE. If you were informed on the subject matter, you would not be caught out as you have.
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Caught out? You are right, I am totally uninformed, so are many other computer users. I am giving you my impression which is that if one runs Ubuntu it is a continual mad scramble to stay up-to-date.

Whenever I read something about Linux it seems to be about Ubuntu, so Ubuntu eventually becomes synonimous with Linux.

Are you guys saying that business users should not be using Ubuntu? And if they do they should not update with new releases?
 
risingtide said:
Caught out? You are right, I am totally uninformed, so are many other computer users. I am giving you my impression which is that if one runs Ubuntu it is a continual mad scramble to stay up-to-date.
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I would hope a business would do some research into a decision rather than going by what their impression of something is. Otherwise I would not hold out much hope for the future of such a business.

Whenever I read something about Linux it seems to be about Ubuntu, so Ubuntu eventually becomes synonimous with Linux.
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This is a fair point.

Are you guys saying that business users should not be using Ubuntu? And if they do they should not update with new releases?
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Business users can use Ubuntu if they want. There is a server version as mentioned above which has a long release cycle. But SUSE and Red Hat have been around for ages in the business environment.

But what you seemingly don't know is that it is a fairly simple process to move with the release versions when they become final. If you are so inclined and is not this "continual mad scramble".
 
My 9.04 install stalled yesterday while doing updates, maybe this is why ;) I had to switch to the uk repos.
 
risingtide said:
I am giving you my impression which is that if one runs Ubuntu it is a continual mad scramble to stay up-to-date.
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No one forces you to update, that choice is entirely yours so there is no mad scramble to update. If you are worried about support use a LTS version.

The development cycle in Linux seems much faster than that of say Windows for instance and I cannot see how this is a bad thing.

Then you get other linux distros which use a rolling release system where updates are done on a daily basis so you always have the latest and greates versions of stuff. This is my own personal choice.
 
risingtide said:
Caught out? You are right, I am totally uninformed, so are many other computer users. I am giving you my impression which is that if one runs Ubuntu it is a continual mad scramble to stay up-to-date.
Click to expand...

Think of it like Windows updates, i.e. you automatically get notified of updates which you can choose to install.
The 6 monthly releases are more similar, but not exactly like service packs. They fix a bunch of things/add new features.
Similar to a Windows environment, you can choose to install updates, e.g. IE 8, or you can ignore them.

There is no mad scramble, generally linux users just prefer to be on the bleeding edge, especially if they're lucky enough to have a test environment/scratch box.
 
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