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22Oct/077

Ubuntu’s 6 month release cycle is not working!

Ubuntu is a fairly new distribution compared to other mature distributions. It made a splash for its user friendliness, building on the strengths of the robust Debian distributions and a lot of marketing, it shot to instant fame. Ubuntu promised that every 6 months there will be a new release, so far it has held to that promise.

However I realize everytime there is a new release, there are lots and lots of problems in them, and unlike calling them "full releases", they seem like a beta release to me. I'm not an ubuntu user, however this week when Ubuntu 7.10, the latest version was released my friend immediately downloaded it, and since then has been grappling with problems: widescreen resolution won't set, compiz-fusion on ATI closed source drivers is broken, gdesklets, Evolution on 64bit Intel etc... And he is not alone, in a thread in ubuntu forums, which is has swelled to 84 pages at the time of writing. So people definitively have lots and lots of problems with the latest release. So I want to ask to the ubuntu community, is in their opinion "6 monts a release" working? To an external observer it doesn't seem to.

I'm an avid OpenSUSE fan. I've waited long for OpenSUSE they went over 6 alpha releases, and many beta releases also its been more than 8 months since the last opensuse release. For me it matters most that new version of a distribution is stable enough even when it takes a year, not hurried to a 6 months artificial time schedule and release it in what ever form it is.

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  • bill hicks

    If you thought for a moment you would notice how silly you sound.

    If what matters to you most is having a stable and not up a very modern OS then just stick with the LTS. If you want a release on a more traditional schedule then going from LTS to LTS would be perfect for you.

    If you want the most cutting edge, then go with something like slackware or gentoo. If you want a happy medium, where you get a modern desktop with most of the showstoppers stamped out then go with the 6 month releases of Ubuntu.

  • admin

    I dont agree with you, first of all its not necessary use Gentoo or Slackware to use cutting edge linux software. I’ve been a long time Slackware user, however even with OpenSUSE I’m using latest releases and I’m not talking about packaged releases, however I’m atleast assured that the base I’m using is stable, unlike a flaky base ubuntu provides which is not good for production environments

  • http://renemoser.net resmo

    i agree with bill hicks, almost. The 7.10 release is not that perfect i expected.

    But it is not that worst you said. Does widescreen work on any other distri (i don’t think so)? So modifiy your xorg.conf by yourself, closed (!) source drivers, this is not an ubuntu problem I think!

    however, if you want stable linux, take Ubuntu LTS or Debian 4.0. Ubuntu not-LTS is quite a testing snapshot (more or less) of Ubuntu LTS release.

  • http://renemoser.net resmo

    btw, the last opensuse release was the worst I’ve ever seen…

  • admin

    @resmo

    Well widescreen works perfect in OpenSUSE 10.3, before this distro I had to manually configure.

  • kuriharu

    I agree with the article. Having a 6 month cycle is arbitrary, especially considering the growth of Ubuntu users. Since Ubuntu is growing by leaps and bounds, it makes sense that the new distros can’t be thouroughly tested.

    The 6 month schedule has been hailed by the MS haters who say “See? MS takes 6 years for new versions, but Ubuntu only needs 6 months!”. Well, true, but 6 months for a release is worthless if the release isn’t stable. That’s why I converted from MS in the first place.

    Every 6 months is tatamount to MS releasing ME back in 2000. It wasn’t properly tested and it sukt.

  • http://forwarddevelopment.blogspot.com Shakakai

    The 6-month schedule for a new release is irrelevant. The real issue is what they try to accomplish within that timeframe. They can maintain the same release schedule by dailing back some of the new features and focusing on properly testing everything.

    Releasing early and often is a great development paradigm, providing valuable feedback from the end users, but it needs to be managed properly to be effective.

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