> If I want to update Firefox on Windows XP, I can do that without Windows forcing me to update to Windows 7 ... Updating Firefox on Ubuntu 11.04 after a certain (very soon in the future) point in time necessitates an update to Ubuntu XX.YY.
I'm not 100% sure about it. As it happens I run both Ubuntu 10.10 (at work) and Ubuntu 11.10. I just saw an alert to upgrade my 10.10 Ubuntu to Firefox 11. I give them major props for keeping an major package like Firefox updated. They probably don't do this for other packages.
Now wrt app updates, people have pointed out downthread that PPAs can be added to the system by clicking a specially-encoded URL in Firefox). People on Windows also do things like download the file, locate it, double click, respond to a UAC prompt etc. So installing through PPA isn't that much more complicated. IMHO.
Also Ubuntu has a software store, to which developers are free to push their updates.
In summary, what people are wishing for in this thread is to have the 3-4 apps they use upgraded to the latest and greatest versions while leaving the core OS and other apps at baseline versions. But ... the solution of using PPA (analogous to downloading the app in Windows) is deemed too nerdy ... Leading to the conclusion that the distro should take responsibility for maintain all the 10s of 1000s of packages for ~10 years. Am I understanding you correctly? Probably ain't gonna happen.
Do you really think it would be a step forward if we got rid of the huge number of non-core packages in distros and had to hunt down PPA sources (again, equivalent to downloading apps from different websites in Windows) for each program. I'm not sure.
Continuing, I'm not sure the lack of updates for old releases is only a technical problem: XP has an installed base, so people jump through ALL kinds of hoops to make their programs work there. IIRC, there are major differences in audio/video/drivers between Win7 and XP, but people (e.g., Flash/Chrome) still do it.
I doubt developers will keep their apps updated and working on XP if it didn't have such a large installed base.
End long reply. :)
