NOTE: This was originally posted on December 14th, 2007 on my (now defunct) Tumblr blog.

So just now I was having a discussion with my girlfriend about what I used to do before we met, before I gained something resembling a life and real social skills, and what have you… basically I was a forum whore. I posted on forums night and day. I was a member of a community, I felt like I belonged somewhere and things were always fine in one community for a little while, but then things started to go sour, every time.

Those that follow Linux news will certainly know that Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" is coming at the end of April. This release is a major milestone for Ubuntu, because it's the second Long Term Support (LTS) release, after 6.06 "Dapper Drake". That means they'll be keeping it up to date for 18 months as normal, but will provide security updates for 3 years on desktop installations and 5 years for servers.

For those wondering, yes, I do host my website on my own server and it is running Dapper. Previously I had made up my mind that I was going to continue using Dapper for the duration of it's support cycle mostly because it is proven and stable but also because it's a major hassle to upgrade. I'm reconsidering this for a number of reasons, but the main one is simply because I enjoy being on the bleeding edge, and a lot of things on my Dapper server are very out of date and won't ever be updated unless I can find backports, or compile programs myself, neither of which I want to do.