Ubuntu: Why do you upgrade?

[Mark Foster]

Some of the discussions on here lately have inspired me to ask the
question: Why upgrade?

Is it because the new distro has some feature you want?
Is it because you like the new bling?
Is it because you want a change?

I rarely (if ever) upgrade Ubuntu when a new release comes out. The
reasons I will upgrade are if my install is about to go out-of-support or
if I'm having problems with a buggy application that is likely to be
resolved by the upgrade.

I also try to avoid upgrading before the new distro is a few months old,
as that gives some of the teething issues time to be settled.

I realise that if everyone did this, nothing would be fixed quickly ;-)
But if you're seeking a stable system, why run leading (or bleeding) edge?

Mark.

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[Bruce Kingsbury]

"shiny new shit syndrome"

I used to upgrade every new release, but over that now. keeping the ubuntu
boxes on 10.04 even for new installs and we'll see how 12.04 looks when it's
out.

--
Sent from my Ideos!

Post by Mark Foster
Some of the discussions on here lately have inspired me to ask the
question: Why upgrade?
Is it because the new distro has some feature you want?
Is it because you like the new bling?
Is it because you want a change?
I rarely (if ever) upgrade Ubuntu when a new release comes out. The
reasons I will upgrade are if my install is about to go out-of-support or
if I'm having problems with a buggy application that is likely to be
resolved by the upgrade.
I also try to avoid upgrading before the new distro is a few months old,
as that gives some of the teething issues time to be settled.
I realise that if everyone did this, nothing would be fixed quickly ;-)
But if you're seeking a stable system, why run leading (or bleeding) edge?
Mark.
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[Aidan Gauland]

Post by Bruce Kingsbury
I used to upgrade every new release, but over that now. keeping the ubuntu
boxes on 10.04 even for new installs and we'll see how 12.04 looks when it's
out.

Is that any different from or better than using Debian stable?

--Aidan

[Mark Foster]

Post by Aidan Gauland

Post by Bruce Kingsbury
I used to upgrade every new release, but over that now. keeping the ubuntu
boxes on 10.04 even for new installs and we'll see how 12.04 looks when it's
out.

Is that any different from or better than using Debian stable?

I run debian almost exclusively as a server box. I still find Ubuntu
(9.04 in at least one case) miles better as a desktop system.

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[Steve Holdoway]

Post by Mark Foster
I run debian almost exclusively as a server box. I still find Ubuntu
(9.04 in at least one case) miles better as a desktop system.

+1. This is my fun lappie... 11.04, but grown up desktop is still at
9.04 ubuntu. By choice, servers are a mix of debian 5, 6 and 10.04 LTS.

Steve
--
Steve Holdoway <***@greengecko.co.nz>
http://www.greengecko.co.nz
MSN: ***@greengecko.co.nz
Skype: sholdowa


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[Bryan Baldwin]

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Hash: SHA1

Some of the discussions on here lately have inspired me to ask the question: Why upgrade?
Is it because the new distro has some feature you want?
Is it because you like the new bling?
Is it because you want a change?
I rarely (if ever) upgrade Ubuntu when a new release comes out. The reasons I will upgrade are if my install is about to go out-of-support or if I'm having problems with a buggy application that is likely to be resolved by the upgrade.
I also try to avoid upgrading before the new distro is a few months old, as that gives some of the teething issues time to be settled.
I realise that if everyone did this, nothing would be fixed quickly ;-) But if you're seeking a stable system, why run leading (or bleeding) edge?

I upgraded to Archlinux just one time. I haven't had to upgrade again since :D
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[Robin Paulson]

Post by Bruce Kingsbury
"shiny new shit syndrome"

yep - new firefox for one. i have a gigantic zotero library for uni,
so the latest and greatest web browser is pretty important. that's my
justification anyway

also i have a vain hope that one day an upgrade to evolution will fix
the problem of it choking on the not-really-that-gigantic number of
emails i get

it is culturally ingrained that 'newer is better', so i guess we all
feel the urge, even if we know the potential problems

Post by Bruce Kingsbury
I used to upgrade every new release, but over that now. keeping the ubuntu
boxes on 10.04 even for new installs and we'll see how 12.04 looks when it's
out.

i do get all the new releases still, but tend to wait till the end of
uni semester in june/november these days - i rely on my laptop for
study, and it dying mid-essay due to an OS upgrade would be very bad.

also it gives things a chance to settle down as the early-adopters
(gamma testers?) find the bugs

the server stays on LTS though - there are far too many gotchas to
kill it. mind, even then a bug in postfix took out my email for a
while in 10.04
--
robin

http://tangleball.org.nz/ - Auckland's Creative Space
http://openstreetmap.org.nz/ - Open Street Map New Zealand
http://bumblepuppy.org/blog/

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[Anton]

Post by Robin Paulson
also i have a vain hope that one day an upgrade to evolution will fix
the problem of it choking on the not-really-that-gigantic number of
emails i get

Bingo! That and the (I so wish I didn't need it) Exchange Connector :)

That was the main reason I'd upgrade Ubuntu. I used to also upgrade
for newer open source ATI drivers so I could get multihead working
with both landscape and portrait monitors - but that has now worked
well for a couple of versions.

Unfortunately Evolution only seems to be getting worse each time
instead. Between Debian Sarge and Ubuntu 10.04 it kinda sucked but
could limp along with the odd restart (plus killing the background
processes), but now with 10.10 it has stopped working for me
altogether - which is odd because 10.04 and 10.10 both used Evolution
2.30. Each previous Ubuntu version generally came with a new Evolution
version that on average fixed about as much as it broke.

Apparently Evolution 2.32 is much better, but I've heard it all that
before. And then after that we'll have GNOME 3.0 to look forward to.

It's almost enough to make me want to run Outlook in a VM (shudder).

As for servers - the main reason for upgrades would be hoping for
mptsas drivers that don't spew scsi bus resets all over the console if
you put SATA drives in a SAS enclosure. Apparently that might've been
fixed in 2.6.38 - but it will be a while before our servers are
running that. Seagate now has cheapish high capacity 7200rpm SAS disks
which we'll probably try instead.

[Robin Paulson]

Post by Anton
Unfortunately Evolution only seems to be getting worse each time
instead. Between Debian Sarge and Ubuntu 10.04 it kinda sucked but
could limp along with the odd restart (plus killing the background
processes), but now with 10.10 it has stopped working for me
altogether - which is odd because 10.04 and 10.10 both used Evolution
2.30. Each previous Ubuntu version generally came with a new Evolution
version that on average fixed about as much as it broke.
Apparently Evolution 2.32 is much better, but I've heard it all that
before. And then after that we'll have GNOME 3.0 to look forward to.

yeah, i got tired of waiting. i switched to thunderbird last week
(thanks for the rec. jaco), and it's still not perfect (why won't it
get *all* my mail when i connect, rather than some folders but not
others?), but it's a lot better and a lot faster.

Post by Anton
It's almost enough to make me want to run Outlook in a VM (shudder).

hmm, outlook's actually pretty good...shame about that silly license nonsense
--
robin

http://tangleball.org.nz/ - Auckland's Creative Space
http://openstreetmap.org.nz/ - Open Street Map New Zealand
http://bumblepuppy.org/blog/

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[Roger Searle]

Post by Robin Paulson
yeah, i got tired of waiting. i switched to thunderbird last week
(thanks for the rec. jaco), and it's still not perfect (why won't it
get *all* my mail when i connect, rather than some folders but not
others?), but it's a lot better and a lot faster

Your message synchronisation settings? The advanced button under
Synchonization and Storage settings?

Cheers,
Roger
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[Robin Sheat]

Post by Mark Foster
But if you're seeking a stable system, why run leading (or bleeding) edge?

New releases aren't necessarily unstable (in the sense of buggy, upgrading
each release is unstable in the Debian-unstable sense, by definition.) As a
developer, it's useful for me to have access to the most common libraries and
language versions. As a user, I like the new shiny and new application
versions. Except for firefox, I rarely upgrade individual applications in the
middle of a release.

People who don't like change of this sort as much as I do, I put on LTS
versions and just upgrade them each time a new one comes out. Then it's one,
infrequent, big change as opposed to many small ones.

Robin.

[Bruce Clement]

Post by Mark Foster
Some of the discussions on here lately have inspired me to ask the
question: Why upgrade?
Is it because the new distro has some feature you want?
Is it because you like the new bling?
Is it because you want a change?

4 reasons -
1. "because the new distro has some feature you want?" from your list is
sometimes true. Not as much now as it once was for me.

2. "because if you fall too far behind with Ubuntu it's a royal pain to get
back to the latest version" often motivates me.

3. "because a version that's too old doesn't get security updates any more."
which can also encountered as "because a security update can need a library
version that isn't on my current version" (As happened to me with mediawiki
on CentOS 4).

I'm trying to work out which of these is my major cause of upgrades, and I'm
stumped.

Bruce
--
Bruce Clement

Home: http://www.clement.co.nz/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Bruce_Clement
Directory: http://www.searchme.co.nz/

"Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good
appreciation of everything that already exists in this field." Mikhail
Kalashnikov
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[Cliff Pratt]

Post by Mark Foster
Some of the discussions on here lately have inspired me to ask the
question: Why upgrade?
Is it because the new distro has some feature you want?
Is it because you like the new bling?
Is it because you want a change?
I rarely (if ever) upgrade Ubuntu when a new release comes out. The
reasons I will upgrade are if my install is about to go out-of-support
or if I'm having problems with a buggy application that is likely to be
resolved by the upgrade.
I also try to avoid upgrading before the new distro is a few months old,
as that gives some of the teething issues time to be settled.
I realise that if everyone did this, nothing would be fixed quickly ;-)
But if you're seeking a stable system, why run leading (or bleeding) edge?

I think it depends on the distro. When I ran Debian, I found that stable
was so annoyingly out of date that I ran a mixed system until I found
that I was mostly running unstable (which wasn't. Too unstable, that is).

Currently I run Ubuntu Server and Desktop with maybe a few more up to
date packages. Nowadays I couldn't tell you what versions of software I
run, but there were times when I needed, for example, the latest
PostgreSQL version or PHP version.

Generally I update the desktops to see what the new version looks like
and the servers a month or two later. I don't want them to get too out
of sync.

Cheers,

Cliff

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[Eliot Blennerhassett]

Some of the discussions on here lately have inspired me to ask the question: Why upgrade?
Is it because the new distro has some feature you want?

On this laptop, started with Ubuntu 8.04, then 9.04, 10.04. More
things 'just work' with the newer releases. E.g. audio, wireless
networking, touchpad, dual monitor support.

My new netbook has funky microphone and SD card interface, so if a new
version made these work, it might be a reason to upgrade.

On the downside, if I have built a patched version of something to get
around a bug that is not fixed by the upgrade, then that means extra
work to fix it again..

For work, I upgrade when the version I'm running falls too far
behind the version that clients are running. (I develop kernel drivers
for sound cards).

Is it because you like the new bling?

Mostly no.

Is it because you want a change?

Not for the sake of it.

--
Eliot

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[Simon Bridge]

Post by Mark Foster
Some of the discussions on here lately have inspired me to ask the
question: Why upgrade?

I keep one box on the latest and one on LTS - because I support these
things for money and I need to be able to tell what the users are trying
to describe to me.

Advise to users is to keep to the LTS releases for mission critical
machines - unless there is some feature not well supported which you
really want.

The upgrades used to be an order of magnitude better each time but that
seems to have stopped for now. What I usually want is the new kernel ...
and I can compile those if I have to.

My latest lappy has hybrid gfx which is spotty right now ... so there
will be an upgrade in the neer future for that one.

Post by Mark Foster
Is it because the new distro has some feature you want?
Is it because you like the new bling?
Is it because you want a change?
I rarely (if ever) upgrade Ubuntu when a new release comes out. The
reasons I will upgrade are if my install is about to go out-of-support or
if I'm having problems with a buggy application that is likely to be
resolved by the upgrade.
I also try to avoid upgrading before the new distro is a few months old,
as that gives some of the teething issues time to be settled.
I realise that if everyone did this, nothing would be fixed quickly ;-)
But if you're seeking a stable system, why run leading (or bleeding) edge?
Mark.
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