[PLUG] Ubuntu 16.04 LTS RC + updates vs. Release?

Neal nsedell at gmail.com
Tue Mar 15 21:43:15 UTC 2016


Greetings.

I'm in the process of setting up yet another home fileserver, mostly for
Samba, general noodling around and having a system running 24x7 for various
home automation experiments. Not terribly interesting hardware-wise, Core
i3 w/2 4TB drives running software RAID 1. Idle power is around 27W in
preliminary testing with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS running nothing beyond the basic
LAMP + SSH + CUPS server install, although none of the servers/services
have been configured so that may be irrelevant to the power discussion.

With Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) due out in April I'm wondering how
risky it would be to use the latest RC for now and then update+upgrade the
normal way whenever the release comes out. I have no experience with Ubuntu
RCs so am asking here to see if there is typically any reason to re-do the
entire system between RC and release.

I don't plan on using any cutting edge filesystems (ZFS) or kernel features
as I'm not aware of any and frankly I'm far more interested in stability
than whiz-bang features to impress my fellow computer afficionados. I can't
see installing 14.04 LTS and only getting three years of support/updates
when 16.04 is right around the corner. Five years is a pretty good
approximation of the time it takes my disk storage needs to
double/quadruple. I've heard 20TB drives may be on the horizon for 2020...
:)

Thanks,

NealS



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