Hi, lee hartley schrieb:
I have read the expected release, and that it is supported a year after going "stable"...
It is "one year after the next release becomes 'stable'", so about three years on average. During that time, security fixes will always be minimally invasive, with a heavy preference for backporting fixes over including a new version with potentially unknown bugs.
e.g. you can possibly use packages from the next release and sort of upgrade as needed...
In theory, you can, but obviously that requires some more integration testing on your part, as Debian cannot test any and all combinations of packages. Generally, there are backported individual packages available from backports.org, however using them is at your own risk.
the other part of this question is (not to start any flaming) at a base/minimal os level, how different is ubuntu, and how much mixing can one safely do? any advice would be great!
It used to be that you can mix and match, but that is no longer the case. Some packages are built from the same source in both distributions, however Ubuntu uses a patched glibc which works better (read: at all) with their patched gcc.
Simon