In technology, you hear the term “support” thrown around a lot. There are multiple definitions of that word. Here, we will focus on two
Development and Maintenance
The first one is related to development and maintenance. This is where the Ubuntu Studio development team comes in. That scope is rather limited since most of the software included in Ubuntu Studio isn’t maintained or packaged by the development team, but rather other teams within Debian and Ubuntu. This includes the lowlatency kernel, which is maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team, and the desktop environment, which is maintained by the Xubuntu team.
This support also deals with the length of time of the maintenance and upkeep of said components. For LTS releases it’s 3 years; for standard releases it’s 9 months.
Technical Support
This deals with something the community (this means you) currently should be doing but is not. This is an area that the developers cannot be doing, otherwise they would be working on Ubuntu Studio full-time. Currently, there are NO paid staff of Ubuntu Studio. Therefore, to keep from burning-out the development team, they will not be handling support requests, but will be glad to provide guidance to those who do.
Providing technical support is as easy as helping each other out on askubuntu.com or on the IRC/Matrix chatroom. We have #ubuntustudio (Matrix: Ubuntu Studio Support) for helping each other out, and #ubuntustudio-offopic (Matrix: Ubuntu Studio Cafe) for casual conversation. Please stay on-topic: i.e. no support conversation in the offtopic (Cafe) room and no offtopic (non-support) in the main (support) room.
Ubuntu Studio Will Die…
…if you do not step-up and start giving back to the community by providing each other with technical support. Relying on the developers to provide technical support is not sustainable as they’re simply volunteers themselves and not available all hours of the day.
You get the operating system for free, the only thing we expect in return is you to give back by helping each other out.
With that, we implore you to please start volunteering on the IRC/Matrix chatrooms and/or on askubuntu.com.
