The Gutsy gunshy

My Ubuntu 7.10 Feisty install is still working great. I'm very reluctant to do the Gutsy upgrade because of all the problems I had with it on the $0 Laptop. And while I appreciated the full control I had over the "touchy" Alps touchpad and it's sometimes annoying tap-to-click function, I've grown to like tapping-to-click and really don't see anything in Gutsy, other than that, that I can't get/do in Feisty.

And since non-LTS releases from Ubuntu get 18 months of support, I can easily make it to the next LTS (long-term support) release in April 2008. I could also go beyond that, all the way to October 2008, without upgrading.

I'll might buckle before then and give Gutsy another try, but I'm more likely to wait until the 8.04 LTS release, which has a three-year lifespan in the Ubuntu world.

Still, running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- which is scheduled to receive security updates through June 2009 -- is a VERY conservative thing to do. I hope the 8.04 LTS release starts out rock solid and remains so for its projected life.

That said, I wonder how long Debian Etch (which was released in April 2007) will be supported. Debian Sarge was released in June 2005, so it was less than two years between Sarge and Etch as stable releases.

I guess the question remains: How long should the lifespan be of a Linux install? The question would be even more relevant if I wasn't dual- and triple-booting. (Right now I'm back to dual-booting because I can't get GRUB to boot Slackware 12).

Again, I vowed to stop dual-booting and instead mantain separate /home partitions with single-boot installs. That way I could theoretically swap distros in and out but keep my files (backed up elsewhere, of course) on the /home partition in between installs.

I continue to have the feeling that when the hardware stays the same, the makers of Linux distributions (and the Linux kernel) concentrate their efforts on the newest computers, often leaving older ones behind. This is problematic for many reasons, the most important being that users of old computers often turn to Linux when the latest version of Windows a) won't run or b) costs money they don't want to spend. Just telling the new Linux user that they might have to go through a half-dozen or more distros before finding the best Linux for their box is a daunting prospect.

But once you get through the first half-dozen installs. ... It is a bit of a sickness, isn't it?