A new version of Ubuntu is released every 6 months, and it’s very easy to upgrade. All you have to do is click a button or two in your update manager and there you have it. You’ve just gone from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10! Is this something that you should be doing?? You could upgrade every six months, or you could upgrade every 2 years. Which would you prefer?? I’ve chosen to upgrade every 2 years. Here’s why…
Stability and the length of support. I’ve chosen to stick with the Long Term Support releases. Every 2 years, an LTS version is released with 3 years of support. The current LTS version is 8.04, Hardy Heron. The standard releases, every 6 months, are supported for 18 months. I want the stability of sticking with my established version. Such reliable service from my machine is more important to me than using the latest release. The older, LTS version has had patches and/or fixes applied already, and it’ll give me few problems. However, if I were to upgrade to the newest version every 6 months, I’m bound to run into issues somewhere. I’d be sacrificing some stability. That’s the price you pay for living on the bleeding edge.
I will of course use 8.10, Intrepid Ibex. In fact, I’ve installed it on a VirtualBox virtual machine, so I can try it out while not affecting my 8.04.1 installation. I trust the fine folks who maintain Ubuntu to take care of me with patches & fixes, even when my 8.04 LTS gets to be long in the tooth, so I won’t be upgrading until version 10.04 LTS. Ubuntu’s site explains all of this here.
Another interesting bit of info that might affect your decision is found here. Is Ubuntu getting slower with each new release??
So, what are your plans for upgrading?? Why are you?? Why aren’t you??
Before upgrading I now learned to check the extremely boring release notes. Why? Because I had this experience when I upgraded and then after upgrading I found out that my video card wasn’t supported anymore ^_^. Unbelievable? Well, it happened. My legacy drivers weren’t accommodated in ibex for quite some time when it has been in heron. Anyway, thanks to Alberto Milone, I was able to use the prop nvidia legacy drivers again. Don’t know exactly how, but I just followed instructions and it worked. So before upgrading now I check which would be broken.
I sort of have my cake and eat it too. I have set aside two partitions for Ubuntu. I have 8.04 on one partition which I normally use. But I wanted to check out 8.10 so it is installed on the other partition. I know I could just check out with the live cd but that is so slow I can’t get a good grip on what the newer version is like. I do the same thing when I want to check out different distributions. Works for me.