Just wondering, what's the difference between standard Ubuntu and Ubuntu LTS versions. Which version should I choose?
LTS = long therm support https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Long_Term_Support/ [sry, german link - google can help]
Some ~ 5000 packages are being maintained for a prolonged time period where as the standard version will loose support as soon as the next one arrives.
What is most important is, that only these 5000 packages maintained by canonical get support, the rest of the packages might even be outdated after as little as 3 Months.
LTS should in theory deliver a save environment for several years without the hassle of loosing compatibility - but thats only true for said ~ 5000 packages.
The current version is an LTS at the moment so that's what you have to download currently anyway.
There are options to download previous versions that are not LTS
But that is an older version already. The LTS just means that they support it for longer, but it is also the most up to date one till October.
LTS is just a version as all the others as well. Currently there is only a "LTS" version the current one until 16.10 (October)
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Basically two versions:
LTS = Long Term Support, giving you 5 years of support before upgrading. So, 12.04 released in 2012 is supported until 2017. 14.04 is 2019, then current 16.04 until 2021.
Development Release = Not sure if this is the technical term, but I've heard it being called the development release. These are your 14.10, 15.04, 15.10, then this year 16.10. They typically have 9 months of support, versus the 5 years of LTS.
Development is more current, but go away much quicker. LTS is stable, but can get old with time.
Sadly that only is true for a realy realy little percentage of packages from the ubuntu repositories; Only the core packages get cared for that long.
Most, vast majority to be precise, of the packages (applications) we use, are NOT updated for that long. 3 monts, 6 months, 9 monts or they are already EOL when the LTS is released.
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Ah yeah, good point.
Not exactly a defining feature of LTS, but it happens that many companies that make linux drivers and packages target the LTS version (for Ubuntu specific packages anyway). AMD for a while made graphics drivers primarily for the LTS version, and that sometimes didn't work on the next two versions. I've seen similar with some other packages from fairly large companies you find not strictly in the main repos. Sometimes it's not a big deal to get them running on later versions, but they target at LTS so that they don't have to touch it for as long, or because it narrows down how much to support, or just because LTS is targeted at businesses, and businesses get better support usually.
Basically you have an older kernel getting updates. When apps no longer support that kernel, you can't really update those apps.
Easily.
I like rolling releases. If it breaks I want to learn how to fix it. Ubuntu is just a buggy piece of shit.
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