Monthly Ubuntu Releases Proposed

An anonymous reader writes "Scott James Remnant, the former Ubuntu Developer Manager at Canonical and current Ubuntu Technical Board leader, has proposed a new monthly release process for Ubuntu Linux. He acknowledges that with the six month releases there are features that end up landing way too soon, leaving them in a sour state for users. With his monthly proposal, Remnant hopes to relieve this by handling alpha, beta, and normal releases concurrently. It's unknown whether Canonical will accept the policy at this time."

Great for devs, bad for users

[subreality]

Rolling releases are great for devs because it lets you put your new feature into the release cycle when it's ready instead of locking it down in whatever state if you don't want to miss the 6 month cycle.

The trouble is that this is terrible for users. The 6 month cycle is already a little aggressive (but tolerable) on support forums. Monthly releases would cause so much confusion when you're searching for other people who have experienced your problem.

Also, how does the support cycle work? Are you going to provide parallel support for 24 releases for two years? If not, do I have to upgrade monthly? I support too many computers for that to be a realistic option.

Re:Oh, it's clear something has to change!

[Nerdfest]

Unfortunately, the problem with 11.04 is not just Unity. There is an abundance of memory leaks and many unstable features even when running the 'classic' Gnome desktop. There are many unstable features around it as well. The weather icon crashes after a day or two. Network manager stops being able to disconnect. If I run an rsync to back up my home directory wifi eventually freezes up completely. Xfce looks nice, but I'm not sure how many problems it's actually going to fix. I'm looking at other distros as well, I'm just not sure which one to go with at this point. I may go back to the last LTS, or even 10.10, which for me was the best behaving Ubuntu release yet.