Hi Uri! On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 5:30 PM אורי <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi, > > I'm sorry for posting twice in the same day to the same mailing list. But > I have a question: I'm using Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS for a few production > servers (one of them I upgraded a few months ago from 14.04). How important > it is to upgrade the OS version, or can I keep it like this? I'm afraid > that things will break up if I upgrade. And if I upgrade, should I upgrade > to Ubuntu 18.04.4 or 20.04? I think since 20.04 has been recently released, > it might have bugs which will be fixed later, and I prefer not to use the > first version of 20.04 but to wait about one year before I use it. Is there > a risk with keeping using 18.04.3? Or should I upgrade at least to 18.04.4? > > I've answered the general question here: https://github.com/shlomif/Freenode-programming-channel-FAQ/blob/master/FAQ_with_ToC__generated.md#will-a-change-i-would-like-to-do-break-some-functionality Quoting it: Will a change I would like to do break some functionality? As the aphorism <https://github.com/shlomif/shlomif-email-signature/blob/master/shlomif-sig-quotes.txt#L1988> goes: The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice, there is.. There is usually a risk, however small, that a change will break some functionality. With good tooling (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation ) it should be relatively easy to revert a change which introduced regressions, and you should do adequate testing. A change may have to be avoided due to being estimated as too time or money consuming, or as having too little gain. However, promising changes should be attempted because: 1. "No guts - no glory." 2. What does "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" really mean? <https://szabgab.com/what-does--if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it--really-mean.html> 3. If you never change anything, your project won't progress. ---------- While you may break some functionality by updating to 18.04.04 , you also risk being affected by known security vulnerabilities (which may also break functionality sooner or later). There is a concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt . Regarding updating to 20.04, it is likely more time consuming and may have more breaking changes, and you may not need all the newest and shiniest software versions there, and you may wish to only update to ubuntu 22.04/etc. I didn't hear of too many horror stories of ubuntu 20.04 being unusable or unstable, but I'm quite out of the loop. Good luck! > Thanks, > Uri. > אורי > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il > -- Shlomi Fish https://www.shlomifish.org/ Buddha has the Chuck Norris nature. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
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