Disclaimer: this is the personal work of the author, and in no way represent an official view from Ubuntu

Disclaimer of the Disclaimer: bugger that, what I'm telling you is nothing but the truth :-)

Ubuntu Myths

Ubuntu has been quite a success over the last few years. With success inevitably comes a number of preconceived notions, that many new users seem to share. The purpose of this page is to refuse what I think are the three biggest and most common ones:

1. Ubuntu only ships the latest and greatest
2. Ubuntu fix bugs for the current and past releases
3. Ubuntu is a stand-alone distribution

Lets tackle them one by one:

Ubuntu only ships the latest and greatest

This is true to some extent. During the development of a new ubuntu release we do try to include all the latest and greatest. Starting some time before release we do limit uploads of new versions until shortly before release no new software will enter into the repository. If for instance we do release on April 2008, and your leatest greatest piece of software is released the same month or later, it won't be included at all in that release. It will however be included in the next new release, also known as ubuntu+1.

Ubuntu fix bugs for the current and past releases

We don't. Seriously. Only security fixes will be made, and only high-impact bugs. Examples of such bugs include:

• Bugs which represent severe regressions from the previous release of Ubuntu
• Bugs which may, under realistic circumstances, directly cause a loss of user data

We tend to focus our work on the development release, also known as ubuntu+1.

Ubuntu is a stand-alone distribution

We are not, we are downstream of Debian. This means:

• We tend to minimise our difference with Debian. Nice to have or bugs with simple workaround solutions are usually not fixed. We may push these fixes to Debian first, and if they don't implement them, we usually follow suit.
• We rarely package new software versions or updates; when we do we push these to Debian so that they will come back to us as Debian packages.

Questions/Comments

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