Ubuntu

[אורי]

Thank you, Shlomi. I like the difference between theory and practice.
אורי
uri at speedy.net


On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 6:19 PM Shlomi Fish <shlomif at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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