[Shrak]

Found this interesting, being an Arch ( Rolling Release ) user myself. I don't see why they couldn't do it, especially if they're going to keep the LTS as an option.
Quote:

Canonical developers are again taking a serious look at moving Ubuntu over to a rolling-release model. Under this form, there would be the Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) releases every two years but between that new packages would be pushed out on a rolling-release basis.

For years there has been talk about turning Ubuntu into a rolling-release distribution, but previously nothing has materialized beyond some mailing list discussions. There's also been discussions of Ubuntu on a monthly release cycle, but again, it's been mostly all talk.

In January was more serious talk about Ubuntu moving to a rolling release model. Leann Ogasawara, the Kernel Team Manager at Canonical, talked about moving to a rolling release model for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. She said it was "in the cards of possibly happening." It would involve eliminating the interim releases and only putting out the Ubuntu LTS release builds every two years. New packages would be pushed out after they are released and have cleared QA.

Source

 

[Bielijbog]

The main problem I see with it for Ubuntu, is if it breaks something on a user's computer, most using Ubuntu won't have any idea what to do. I see Ubuntu as pretty idiot proof now and it's growing more so.

On Arch, you built the system up yourself so you can do at least some troubleshooting. When I break my system, I more often than not, know what I did and can reverse it (Last time I added an entry to fstab with the wrong mount point by accident.)

I'm not saying they shouldn't, it just might make their help forum explode and it's already pretty crowded.

 

[Shrak]

Rolling Release still goes through testing, just shorter. And there's little that can go wrong without a user causing it, and if a user is dicking around as root without knowing what they're doing then I'm sorry but they deserve it

( not to sound mean though ) And with it being Ubuntu they can provide more testing than Arch in terms of developer-wise and user-wise since there's generally more users over at Ubuntu. Release schedule doesn't make it any less idiot proof though, potentially making it better, instead of having to worry about drivers that require newer kernels and such ( a big reason why I don't use Debian stable, it makes me pick and choose from testing/sid just to get my wireless running properly along with a few other things, where Arch is install it and done for those particular drivers ), everything will be (mostly) up to date and drivers should be that much easier.

The help forum is only exploded with people not knowing anything about Ubuntu or Linux in general, there's nothing to help that since it's one of the most well known distro's and generally known as newb friendly. I don't see moving to Rolling Release adding that much more to the mess that the ubuntu forums are

 

[FateousMaximous]

Well if they did go to a rolling release and you really thought that people new to Linux couldn't handle rolling release (which I think that rolling release isn't all that hard), just advise people to use LTS. Though like Shrak said Canonical will probably have a longer testing period before pushing something out to everyone than other rolling release distros. All in all I can't really see much of a reason not to, it will make it easier to install on newer hardware (this phoronix article comes to mind) without making it much (if at all) harder on the end user. I doubt that many people who buy a brand new Haswell processor would install Ubuntu before 13.04 comes out, but it probably would happen with at least a few people.

 

[jrl1357]

Quote:

Originally Posted by FateousMaximous

Well if they did go to a rolling release and you really thought that people new to Linux couldn't handle rolling release (which I think that rolling release isn't all that hard), just advise people to use LTS. Though like Shrak said Canonical will probably have a longer testing period before pushing something out to everyone than other rolling release distros. All in all I can't really see much of a reason not to, it will make it easier to install on newer hardware (this phoronix article comes to mind) without making it much (if at all) harder on the end user. I doubt that many people who buy a brand new Haswell processor would install Ubuntu before 13.04 comes out, but it probably would happen with at least a few people.

semi-rolling like LMDE could work too