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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

I can update the included web browser on Windows or OS X without waiting six months and it hasn't affected my stability thus far. thats the kind of thing I imagine Ubntu would be fixing here - shipping a currrent firefox, new drivers, etc, rather than changing glibc versions.

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>update the included web browser on Windows or OS X without waiting six months

You can already do this in Ubuntu and variants by adding a ppa (personal package archive?).

Also, at least on Kubuntu, the 6 month cycle isn't preventing releases that bork a lot of peoples systems. Latest one was broken from the off as not all files were uploaded to the archives and then the nVidia drivers clashed with the desktop clock (!).

Yes, but PPAs are unsupported third party unsupported software. Now Dell/Canonical support won't help your mum fix her laptop's browser.

There are a lot fewer factors in shipping a new firefox for OS X than there are for Linux. On OS X, for the most part, all of the important dynamic libraries are frozen at a single or at one of a small number of versions, everybody is either ia32 or amd64, there aren't distro patches applied to things, there isn't the wide array of Desktop Environment configurations that there is in other Unixes, etc, etc. This isn't to say that rolling releases aren't possible; it's just trickier for Linux distros.

Also, you have to update the glibc sometime.

Ubuntu is primarily ia32 or amd64 too - there are no PPC, MIPS etc builds on http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/alternative-downloa....

The issue stopping Firefox releases for Ubuntu is that AFAICT Firefox don't bother packaging their app for Ubuntu and Ubuntu wait six months to do their own packaging.

Indeed, you have to update to a major version of glibc every few years, but I imaging most people's hardware will die first.

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