Ubuntu

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Uri!

‪On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 5:30 PM ‫אורי‬‎ <uri at speedy.net> wrote:‬

> Hi,
>
> I'm sorry for posting twice in the same day to the same mailing list. But
> I have a question: I'm using Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS for a few production
> servers (one of them I upgraded a few months ago from 14.04). How important
> it is to upgrade the OS version, or can I keep it like this? I'm afraid
> that things will break up if I upgrade. And if I upgrade, should I upgrade
> to Ubuntu 18.04.4 or 20.04? I think since 20.04 has been recently released,
> it might have bugs which will be fixed later, and I prefer not to use the
> first version of 20.04 but to wait about one year before I use it. Is there
> a risk with keeping using 18.04.3? Or should I upgrade at least to 18.04.4?
>
>
I've answered the general question here:

https://github.com/shlomif/Freenode-programming-channel-FAQ/blob/master/FAQ_with_ToC__generated.md#will-a-change-i-would-like-to-do-break-some-functionality

Quoting it:

Will a change I would like to do break some functionality?

As the aphorism
<https://github.com/shlomif/shlomif-email-signature/blob/master/shlomif-sig-quotes.txt#L1988>
goes: The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there
is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice, there is..
There is usually a risk, however small, that a change will break some
functionality. With good tooling (such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation ) it should be
relatively easy to revert a change which introduced regressions, and you
should do adequate testing.

A change may have to be avoided due to being estimated as too time or money
consuming, or as having too little gain. However, promising changes should
be attempted because:

   1. "No guts - no glory."
   2. What does "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" really mean?
   <https://szabgab.com/what-does--if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it--really-mean.html>
   3. If you never change anything, your project won't progress.

----------
While you may break some functionality by updating to 18.04.04 , you also
risk being affected by known security vulnerabilities (which may also break
functionality sooner or later). There is a concept of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt .

Regarding updating to 20.04, it is likely more time consuming and may have
more breaking changes, and you may not need all the newest and shiniest
software versions there, and you may wish to only update to ubuntu
22.04/etc. I didn't hear of too many horror stories of ubuntu 20.04 being
unusable or unstable, but I'm quite out of the loop.

Good luck!



> Thanks,
> Uri.
> אורי
> uri at speedy.net
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>


-- 
Shlomi Fish https://www.shlomifish.org/

Buddha has the Chuck Norris nature.

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
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