[ale] phoronix.com: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop To Be Supported Longer (5 Years)

[JD]

On 10/22/2011 08:31 PM, Richard Faulkner wrote:
> Interesting development and a wise move (IMHO).  But speaking from my
> own narrow opinion, I am not a fan of Unity nor Gnome 3 nor KDE or
> Xfce.  I'm rather partial to Gnome 2 and am quite happy with that.  I
> liked Fedora and I really like Ubuntu but more and more find myself
> wondering if I'm going to be custom building my own fork of Ubuntu to
> get what I want or go to Mint.  Am I the only one thinking this way or
> are others like me and happy with the desktop classic?  Perhaps a well
> placed email to Canonical asking for a choice at installation for which
> desktop we want?  Is such a thing feasible?  Perhaps not in a CD release
> but certainly in a DVD image?
> 

For the last 2 yrs, I've been loading Ubuntu Server onto my desktops,
with only ssh, then adding the LXDE metapackage to add desktop stuff.
This keeps the bloat down. The trade-off is that there are fewer GUI
configuration tools in LXDE and no fancy 3D graphics effects out of the
box. Some people might consider that a good thing.

Longer desktop support from Canonical is generally good, but there's a
downside completely outside their control. Social networks change all
the time and break clients. Twitter did this 8+ months ago. The 10.04
client I used to tweet and post to identi.ca simultaneously stopped
working with twitter. The package manager version of that popular
program in the Ubuntu repos has not been updated  probably due to
library changes made by the developers of that program. I don't tweet
anymore, it isn't that important to me.  To an average user, the program
would seem broken. I couldn't find a backport or find a private PPA with
newer versions of the program - I think they switched to gnome3
libraries. It is easier simply not to tweet for me.  Over time, that
same issue will happen to more and more programs that have internet
website connectivity built-in. It is hard to maintain programs across
too many releases, especially when the underlying libraries have major
updates.

Usually the programmers need to stay on older OSes to maintain
compatibility, but in the FLOSS world, programmers tend to run bleeding
edge tools and libraries, which pushes end-users to the latest and
newest releases.  It is an upgrade treadmill.  LTS releases help, but
they do not solve this issue.

Something I've learned over time - newer isn't necessarily better.