This is something that's so often overlooked. If you want a stable desktop for production use, use an LTS version of ubuntu. If you want 'close to the edge', get the last version or two, they come with 18 months support. If you want to fool around on the edge, well, that's where they do crazy stuff like this. Early adopters are beta testers, always have been, always will be.
> If you want a stable desktop for production use, use an LTS version of ubuntu.
I'm not so sure about it. All releases are supposed to be stable (final releases at least, not the current beta). LTS has nothing to do with "not-beta" - it's about the length of support only and this is the way it's advertised on the ubuntu website. Whenever they write about "stable" regarding LTS it's in the business context - it's "not changing" rather than "not crashing".
There's a difference between stable (reliable) and stable (unchanged). When talking about the stability of LTS, people are meaning that the package set, and the versions of those packages, will not change throughout the support cycle of the release. Eg, if the release comes with Firefox 3.0, it will stick with Firefox 3.0 for the duration of the cycle, even though Firefox 4.0 or later versions are released in the interim.
Of course, the problem is that LTS releases are horribly outdated (the packages in the repos), that it becomes hard to be productive. I needed a new version of a library (actually not THAT new) to compile something, and it just wasn't there! LTS for the lose.
The whole idea of LTS is to leave outdated versions of the repo and only port bugfixes and critical security stuff backwards while leaving a direct upgrade path to the next LTS open.
