I have PPA set-up for GIMP Stable (2.8.22) and GIMP Dev (2.9.6 currently) as well as Inkscape, Audacity, Java and others... Obviously the Dev updates more frequently than the Stable! The same setup would be optimal for NetBeans, but initially it would be the ppa:apacheprojects/netbeans-dev and then when NB9 is downloadable next to Java 9 (currently this is 8.2 next to Java 9 on http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html which may confuse some) a ppa:apacheprojects/netbeans-stable would be added. Each would be updated on Apache's end as needed; -dev frequently and -stable infrequently. The user can make the report-bugs/don't-report-bugs call by simply implementing one of the PPAs! Perfect system, really... Ubuntu is already reaching a 15% market share, and apps are purported to run 300% faster under this OS! I switched my Android Studio 3 development over (on an Intel i7) and it is 30X faster overall... Black Magic Design has ported Fusion 9 and DaVinci resolve 14 for the same reason. Certain software requires hyper-optimized OSes, and new media packages and coding packages fit that bill... The main reason for this request is the elimination of all but the initial SUDO PPA install/update requests, versus quite a lot of end-user work to install and update via other OSes... ;) Thanks for considering this request! Walls. PS: Ubuntu LTS 17.04 is amazing, uses only 250-350MB and has already eliminated swap due to 16GB DDR4 chips becoming the affordable sweet-spot in systems design (thanks to AMD Ryzen). I have all 8GB of my IBM ThinkCentre i7 to use for Android Studio 3.0. I hear Ubuntu LTS 17.10 is even better. If you have not been packaging for Ubuntu LTS I would add this as soon as possible, as it has much of the OS momentum. WJ (copied from users@ forum)
