What the Heck Happened to my LTS?

In around May I updated my workstation and my wife’s laptop up to Kubuntu LTS 14.04. I had lots of trouble with each version of Kubuntu leading up to 12.04 LTS. There was always something that did not work and I would wait very impatiently for the next release hoping it would fix all my issues. While they usually did, I invariably ended up with some new issue or issues. When 12.04 finally came out it was the first time everything worked. As they say, if it isn’t broke don’t fix it.

And I did not. That is until 14.04 came out. Along with it being another LTS (long term service) release, it had updates for a few applications that included features I wanted.

The weird thing was, ever since the release, my wife’s laptop seemed to need a lot of updates. Since it was a new release I did not think too much of it. New versions often have a lot of updates in the first couple of months. Also, because I updated my workstation a little later (I figured why not throw the wife to the wolves first) I could not compare the two machines directly.

Well, in the last couple of weeks we have been having a lot of trouble with the wife’s machine. After one update, local DNS stopped working. After another, her X-server would not use the nVidia drivers. Then in the last couple of days I have noticed hundreds of MBs of downloads that my machine was not getting. And kernel versions that were several ahead of mine.

I have not been keeping track of the silly codenames for Ubuntu for awhile now. After seven or eight they really start to blur together. But tonight when once again updating my wife’s machine and seeing that mine had none, I noticed utopic/main in the package list retrieval. I quickly ran an update on my machine and sure enough it was trusty/main. A quick check of the wiki and I found the problem. Utopic is from the future!!!

Sure enough:

swoogan@workstation:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
Release:        14.04
Codename:       trusty

swoogan@laptop:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu Utopic Unicorn (development branch)
Release:        14.10
Codename:       utopic

Somehow the last person I want running a beta release of Kubuntu, is. So that explains all the problems we have been having. How this happened remains unexplained…