[sf-lug] updates Re: SF-LUG Sunday March 3, 2019 meeting notice

[Rick Moen]

Elaborating just briefly, because I'm not sure my overall point was
entirely clear:

[About the notion of installing here in the year 2019 the Ubuntu 
16.04 LTS 'Xenial 'Xerus' series from 2016, in preference to the 
_current_ LTS series, 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' from 2018:]

> As I already said, it's not just the short (and in most cases
> vanishingly short) remaining support life that makes me wonder why
> anyone would install this in 2019.  Even more important, I note that 
> it's also not the current LTS release.
> 
> Lots of problems with 10.04.x?  Hmm, interesting.  Maybe they should,
> y'know, consult a Linux user group.  ;->

As many folks here may know, I was already kind of an old-geezer Linux
user when Canonical, Ltd. started producing "Ubuntu Linux" and its
derivatives starting in 2004 in a surrounding cloud of relentless
marketing.  It has been evident from that point to the present that
Canonical pushes really hard to try to get itself synonymous with
novice-focussed Linux on the desktop -- and their big promise was to be
basically Debian but with two key difference (aside from the marketing):

1.  They promised to release about every six months without fail.
They accomplished this by dropping all but the most commercially
significant CPU platforms Debian supports.  (Debian was taking as long
as three years between releases, primarily because of difficulties
getting each release production-ready on 13 diverse CPU platforms.)

2.  They promised to have a coherent suite of desktop software in
-recent versions- for each Desktop Environment (DE) flavour.  This
addressed dissatisfiction among novice-dominated desktop users with the
sometimes old version number in Debian-stable, along with
dissatisfaction among those same users with Debian's alternatives, the
closely related rolling distributions Debian-testing and
Debian-unstable, not having rock-solid stability the way Debian-stable
does.

So, basically the entire point of loading Ubuntu is that you're a
non-technophile desktop user who insists on having nearly cutting-edge
versions of apps for GNOME (in Ubuntu) or XFCE (in Xubuntu) or LXDE (in
Lubuntu).  You-plural, or at least the early iteration of you-plural,
fled from Debian-stable because it furnished desktop application
versions a couple of years out of date.

And, in that historical context, my point is that it seems rather ironic
to now hear that people who favour Ubuntu, the distro founded in
insistence on recent-version applications, might be going out of their
way to install the last-but-one LTS release rather than the current one
-- so as to guarantee they'll get desktop-app versions at least three
years out of date.

Like, hullo?  Wasn't that exactly what you-plural adopted *buntu in
order to get away from?  But now you're seeking it out?