Users will soon need to make this decision

Apr 17, 2015 12:06 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has hit final freeze, and users will now be confronted with an important choice, to upgrade or not to upgrade.

Canonical publishes new Ubuntu version every six months, and users always experience the same conundrum, to upgrade or to keep the old version and continue with it until the distro reaches end of life. As it stands right now, there are three supported Ubuntu distros, 12.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS, and 14.10. The first two will continue to received support for quite some time (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS until 2019), but the support for Ubuntu 14.10 will expire by the end of this year.

Some of the latest Ubuntu distros haven't been very different from one another, and users don't feel like they have a good reason to upgrade their current installation, not to mention the fact that it could mess up some of the installed applications. It's always a good idea to weigh the benefits before embarking on an upgrade journey, but people seldom have reasons not to do it.

Upgrading Ubuntu is easy

If you set up your Ubuntu OS to check for new or LTS versions, from Software & Updates, you will get notified about the upgrade on April 23, which is the day of the launch. Depending on your system, it can take a while, but it requires very little input from the user. The only major problem is that the upgrade tool will uncheck all the third-party PPAs.

Ubuntu users need to know that the 15.04 branch comes with a few important changes and improvements for Unity, a new Linux kernel branch, and a few other small modifications. It might not seem like a big update, but it's always good to have the latest packages if you're interested in performance.

If you have an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS version, you'll be glad to know that some of the improvements made to Unity have been backported to that system as well. If you want to continue with your LTS system, you might think that a new Ubuntu might not be for you.

As usual, we recommend that you do a full reinstallation of the system, whenever possible. It beats an upgrade any day of the week. Ubuntu 15.04 is scheduled to be launch on April 23, and we have a list of new features detailed for the OS, in case you need a more informed opinion.