How often do we need GNU/Linux releases?
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 10/02/2008 - 12:08.
Of what use is an operating system if all it does is to make you look forward to the next release - simply because umpteen bugs have been introduced by all the new features in the current version?
For years, Microsoft thrived on just such a strategy, adding features to Windows as though they were going out of style and not caring about anything apart from marketshare.
From 1995 onwards, the name of the product reflected the fact that the company's expertise lay more in marketing than technology - Windows 3.1 in 1990 was followed by Windows 95.
What has been the end result? Windows is a widespread but highly insecure and buggy operating system which everyone is forced to use simply because it has become some kind of de facto standard.
I fear that GNU/Linux - or at least some distributions - is following in its wake.
Sam, there is one more tricky thing with GNOME
beranger.org: GNOME never fixes bugs in “older” releases. When you report a bug in, say, gedit 2.16.0, it might get fixed (or not) in something like gedit 2.25.90, which will be part of GNOME 2.26. When this happens, nobody will port the bug fix back in gedit 2.16, 2.18, 2.20, 2.22, 2.24, no matter how critical that bug was!
To my knowledge, this never happened for a bug in GNOME. There is too much work and the risk is too high for a distro to screw a working GNOME release, so they won't backport any fix.
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