Making Hardy Heron as LTS is a tactical mistake
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 05/15/2008 - 07:52.
In April Canonical released Ubuntu 8.04 LTS more popularly known as Hardy Heron. It was the eighth Ubuntu version to be released so far but more importantly it is an LTS release which means that it would be supported 3 years for the desktop and five years for the servers.
The word LTS or “Long Term Support” brings three things to my mind stability, stability and stability. This is because it means trust from the corporates, newbies and server market where Ubuntu so far languishes. The last LTS release Dapper Drake was a landmark release in many ways it was extremely stable, had lots of features, and was easy to use. Till this day I remember Dapper as the Linux version which shifted me to Linux. I still consider it as the release which brough Gold Standard to the Ubuntu Linux.
Now with such a history of remarkable success that Dapper had, Hardy falls far too short. Though Hardy ran fine in my PC to an extent that I could call it good and had great set of features but however I did not find it so much better than Gutsy than Dapper was than Breezy. Many people are having lots of problems with Hardy. In fact things that worked in Gutsy did not work in Hardy. In my case for instance Compiz does not work as I made it work in Gutsy.
Getting to my point, Hardy though a good distro is not great enough to be labelled as an LTS release.
Hardy is hard ? Gnome is not stable chasing mono bindings ?
Mono is MIT project done by Novell people. Debian is going without Mono and staying with stable KDE(3.0) and Gnome(2.14?).
Gnome(python) is not stable without Mono bindings, nowadays. Most Gnome applications are not stable with Mono bindings nowadays either.
The next Ubuntu LTS will have the same kind of problems. Mono project objectives kept on changing like a moving target.
KDE is also making tremendous changes, will take years to accomplish their new technology. So, some ubuntu offshoots with simpler window manager(Xfce) will succeed better depending on their toolkits(gtk1/gtk+?) being used. We are still going with Mpeg4/h.264 pixel oriented window manager with layered toolbars, taskbars and icons for mouse operating system or touch screen operating system.
Without Debian peple; Linus destroyed all Linux distros(confusing kernel 2.6.x overriding kernel 2.4.x). Bugs galore desktops; and browsers(Firefox v3.0 and Opera v9.5) are not backwards compatible either.