14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu GNOME developers have finally submitted their proposal for it to become an LTS flavor in the greater family of Ubuntu.
It took the Ubuntu GNOME developers a while to determine the support period that they were willing to endorse. Contrary to popular belief, not all flavors in the Ubuntu family actually go for the five years of support.
There are multiple reasons for this decision, but the main one is that the teams working on these flavors are not from Canonical and are doing all the work for free. They are not employed by Canonical and most of them are doing it more as a hobby than anything else.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) will be supported for period of five years, which, believe it or not, is quite a lot. There are a just a handful of Linux distributions out there that even come close to five years. Getting security updates for an operating system until 2019 is not an easy task.
“The Ubuntu GNOME Team is proposing that the Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 release be supported for 2 years and 3 months as an LTS release,” reads the proposal made by the developers.
You might wonder what's with the strange number, 2 years and 3 months. Well, Canonical is pushing out a new LTS release every two years. This would mean that Ubuntu GNOME developers intend to provide support just a little over the release of Ubuntu 16.04, in 2016.
“Many of our users find the 9 month release cycle on standard release too short and would prefer a stable system they can use for longer than this. We are thus proposing that Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 be supported as an LTS release, for the duration until the next LTS cycle,” also reads the announcement.
Also, the GNOME developers intend to have four point releases, in accordance with the already established Trusty release schedule.
Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS Beta 1 (Trusty Tahr) was made available only a couple of weeks ago and featured a lot of interesting stuff, including a lot of packages from GNOME 3.10. The distribution will also be probably based on Linux kernel 3.13, although, if all goes well, the Canonical team might be able to integrate Linux kernel 3.14 just in time.
Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS Beta 1 (Trusty Tahr) is expected to land on April 17, but a second Beta will be released by the end of March.