Longer Development Cycle
If we look back at the last ten years and the projects we invested resources in, we see two things. Well, I see two things anyway, I hope you’ll agree
I think one of our strengths is that we’re doing things incrementally and changing things slowly. We are introducing change and sometimes it annoys some of our users, but we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t radically affect who we are or the user experience we provide.
Another important strength of ours, as I see it, is that we value our independence and we are able to react and develop our own solutions when we’re not happy with the alternative. We made some bold moves in the past, sticking to LTS, rejecting Snap, developing alternatives to a new GNOME that didn’t feel like GNOME, and I’m really glad we did. These decisions weren’t easy to make and some of them cost a huge amount of time and resources to implement. But looking back, I think they were key. I think we’re first and foremost an operating system: a product, a user experience. We’re also a “distribution”, but we’re not just a distribution.
Whether we “distribute” (for instance with KDE) or we actively develop solutions (for instance with XApp and Cinnamon), we spend a lot of time in release management. Releasing often is important because it means we get a lot of feedback and bug reports when we introduce changes. We follow the same process over and over again. It’s a process that works very well and it produces these incremental improvements release after release. But it takes a lot of time, and it caps our ambition when it comes to development. With a release every six months plus LMDE, we spend more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing.
We’re thinking about changing that and adopting a longer development cycle. As it happens, our next release will be based on a new LTS and we just ran out of codenames
Stay tuned, we’ll have more information on this. Obviously the codenames strategy doesn’t matter much, but we are very interested in adopting a longer development cycle.