Comment 19 for bug 1206387

On Dec 2, 2013, at 6:11 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:

> Only if you use the new point release media, or
> explicitly opt in to the new enablement stack, do you get the newer kernels.
>
> [...]
>
> If you have newer hardware that requires the newer enablement stack, it's
> better to have it available than not, even if that means some out-of-tree
> modules are not available. If you don't need the new enablement stack, then
> it's recommended that you use the LTS kernel.

Not to get too off topic (and I tried to bring this up in UDS chats when rolling releases/HWE became a thing), but that really only works in homogenous environments, which are not really a thing in academia or other large non-enterprise environments. In our case (and I suspect Russ speaks for a similar environment), we replace our workstations on a rolling 3-year cycle (meaning we get new hardware whenever Dell feels like changing the chipset). So some machines require HWE, others don't.

The other challenge is that to the average end user, it is not at all clear that using point release media means an HWE stack, but using original media and upgrading to the point release doesn't. We had a terrible time when the Quantal HWE came out, and whether or not they had working OpenAFS was determined by whether they installed from an ISO image or a net install.