What does it mean by "LTS" and Support

LTS

There is a little bit of confusion what is meant by a LTS release … lets explain…

LTS is an acronym for “Long Term Release”. In our case, Ubuntu Budgie has given a commitment to both Canonical and our loyal community to support a release for a period of time - three years.

Support is in terms of here on discourse - either helping directly or guiding folks to where best to get a query resolved. Both the team and the UB community support each other and we warmly welcome enthusiastic people to help out with support matters.

Support also means testing each of the five point releases of an LTS i.e. 22.04.1, 22.04.2 etc. This is again a key agreement with have with Canonical. In return Canonical hosts our ISOs/produces ISOs and can & do resolve software issues covering the ‘main repository’. Any software in the “universe repository” is maintained by knowledgable Ubuntu packagers - not necessarily Canonical. Budgie Desktop software mostly fall into the “universe repository” category.

Support means helping to introduce fixes to any software / software component that is causing stability issues - crashes/ major usability issues. Shared components that affect multiple flavours also need shared testing. Over the lifetime of a LTS several fixes will be uploaded. So a version “10.6.1” budgie desktop is not the same at the beginning of a LTS cycle compared to the end of the LTS. Over time, patches will be introduced to resolve major issues.

LTS support is limited to stock Ubuntu Budgie. We do not support any derivations/forks etc of Ubuntu Budgie. We do support budgie-desktop on Debian and welcome all Debian users. Whilst our packages are installable on a Ubuntu base such as GNOME-Shell, we will make reasonable endeavours to support your choice but please do ensure you have tested on stock Ubuntu Budgie first.

Support though does NOT mean introducing new features into software available in the Ubuntu repositories - or at the very least only minor-minor features. That means a big change such as a v10.7 or a v11 budgie-desktop will not be introduced into a LTS distro since these big releases involve risk. The rewards do not (arguably) outweigh the risk of potential breakage. LTS releases are used by many hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and its impossible to test thoroughly all the combinations a piece of software needs to interact with.

We do make available development releases of major components such as budgie-desktop so if you are experienced you may wish to help test these. They are obviously targetted at the next release - but can be (mostly) used on a LTS release.

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