Ubuntu 20.03 rather than 20.04

If Ubuntu 20.03 was created and then Ubuntu 20.04, it would be great. Ubuntu 19.10 is lagging in some aspects and people are downloading 19.10 rather than Testing Version.

People absolutely should be downloading 19.10 (or indeed 18.04) and not 20.04, given 20.04 isn’t finished yet. We don’t expect all users to download the pre-release Focal Fossa, only a small number of enthusiasts typically download the development versions, this is normal.

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Given the fact that 20.04 is mostly developed, it could become into 20.03.

The point of a release is to satisfy certain expectations and then to provide meaningful support (e.g. updates, stability guarantees) on top of that.

This includes transition periods due to software updates and tons of testing and iterating to fix or contain release-relevant bugs.

You can’t just cut a distribution release as a snapshot and don’t look like a fool without a sensible release process. Meaning: A release is not an end in itself. If you don’t care about a certain quality level, you can use a development version anyway, or rather even any rolling release distro.

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I think you perhaps greatly underestimate just how much work from how many folks goes into a single release.

Seems like you might not fully appreciate how Ubuntu’s predictable releases are an important component of it’s popularity, it’s workflow, and it’s identity.

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GNOME 3.36 has only just started to be uploaded and predictably at this stage of development there are a number of temporary issues. I’ve seen several bug reports from users who don’t appreciate that such problems will resolve themselves once the transition to the new version of GNOME is complete.

Extensions break, especially those installed directly from https://extensions.gnome.org/, and some functionality is lost pending the update of a vital component. I’d be very worried if the next release was due in a couple of weeks time, i.e. Ubuntu 20.03 before the end of the month. I’m sure everything is on course for release on April 23rd.

What I’m saying is that like with Fedora, Ubuntu’s releases are always around a month to six weeks after the latest GNOME release to allow for uploading, testing and the fixing of major bugs.

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Ubuntu 20.04 (and 19.04, 19.10) is sort of locked down system with just two system extensions. It doesn’t come with an app that allows other extensions to be installed by default. The user has to read “10 things to do after installing…” or has some knowledge of using sudo … get those extensions in. The default web browser doesn’t immediately connect to the gnome-shell-extensions… and so on.

If you take Fedora or OpenSuse (and few others with Gnome), those distros have that app as a default app, and the new Gnome or the extensions won’t be much of a problem.