[basman]

> He basically wanted to upgrade just one (obscure) app, and the process triggered the automatic removal of Gnome2 and installation of Unity. Just _IMAGINE_ how nightmarish this must look for normal users. You simply dont remove somebodys installed desktop sneakily from under their feet. You simply dont. That feels like the total loss of control over your computer.

Hmm, that's not exactly what happened, according to the link: "I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons."

Your overall point is well taken, but I wonder how much it affects what I think of as "normal users", who don't care so much about upgrading to the bleeding edge of scons. Consider a hypothetical user of Hardy, so they've had it for four years: what are they actually missing if what they do is web surfing, email, and maybe document editing?

[durin42]

Let's say they use instant messenger services, so they have Pidgin installed. I'm pretty sure there have been critical bugfixes in Pidgin, and the old Hardy version of Pidgin was so flaky for me 2 years ago (back before my workplace had moved to Lucid) that I installed my own from source.

Ubuntu's answer to that? Well, those aren't security fixes, so you can upgrade to $LATEST_RELEASE if you want the non-critical fixes. Ubuntu is trying to force a 2+ year bugfix cycle on software maintainers, and that's just not realistic for many small teams (both proprietary and open source).

This is a particular example, but I can think of other cases where this might be a problem. OpenOffice updates after a new MS Office release come to mind offhand.