I’m planning to use a daily build of Ubuntu Budgie as a “rolling release” type of distro. I’m fine with the occasional breakage, but in general, how often do things go awry?
In general, we try not to push if it’s even possibly broken. I remember one occasion, fix was a matter of hours.
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Ah I see, that’s great! So it’s decently safe to install a daily build as your primary OS? (if not, I’m fine with sticking with 20.04)
Aw, I get this error while installing 20.10 in a VM.
It’s the exact same error that I get in Kubuntu, ubuntu mate, and stock ubuntu 20.10 daily builds in VirtualBox and GNOME boxes. Have not tested with 20.04 though. Any ideas?
It’s a good question.
In terms of stability I think of the daily builds much like the arch model of rolling releases rather than the curated rolling releases of manjaro solus etc I.e. those distros that have a semblance of unstable + release rather than software immediately released from the packager straight onto someone’s desktop.
So in the latter case , you get the release immediately as tested by the packager but no real integration with other packages.
Where packages have test suites built in debian and ubuntu, these are run through together with builds of related packages to see if their test suites pass. So you do get this automatic computer generated assurance that packages have had some tests applied.
Ubuntu’s daily builds are created from Debian unstable branch. So no testing other than the auto tests mentioned above together with a rinse and repeat of the auto tests when rebuilt under ubuntu.
So do things go wrong? Short answer… of course they do. Packagers are human after all. They can and do get things wrong. They are building software directly from developers … who are themselves fallible … and make mistakes with their releases.
Your privilege of getting the most up to date software immediately does come with an onus on you the user. You are helping to use the software and find and report issues as you find them. When things go wrong you must help resolve stuff and don’t sit back and complain loudly that your favourite piece of software has stopped working … suddenly your computer is throwing errors on boot etc etc.
You have to be proactive and engaged.
It’s fun, don’t get me wrong… just dont expect a smooth ride 100% of the time.
… and that proves my point… for a couple of weeks now Canonical have been battling with that issue, various fixes have been proposed but things are not quite there just yet.
Thanks for the long and detailed explanation.
I’m willing to be an active member of the Ubuntu community, report bugs, and try my best to fix them upstream.
… and that proves my point… for a couple of weeks now Canonical have been battling with that issue, various fixes have been proposed but things are not quite there just yet.
Ah, in that case I’ll stick to 20.04 until it’s resolved… But when it is resolved, is there a way to switch to devel without reinstalling?
update-manager -d
That will uplift 20.04 to 20.10 daily.
Separately you can then switch to ‘Rhino’ to permanently leave yourself on a rolling daily build and never have to upgrade to the next distro series on release. How to switch to ‘Rhino’ is a different question…
‘Rhino’ requires a daily build to start with, sadly.
On a side note, did gnome-screensaver finally get replaced with LightDM-locker? That’s one thing that really bugged me…
Ah, that’s sad. Is there a way to install another lock screen then, like i3lock? Would I have to recompile budgie?
We are in offtopic territory now
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