[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Choice of operating system

[Dee]

>From what I can tell, these are the install docs for ROS2 1. From the layout of the kinetic installation page 2, Debian is listed as being supported.

Debian is listed as supported but the version of Debian listed is considered quite out of date with that versions security support now being passed and about another 18 months left on the long term support. That means that the debian community is only giving necessary security patches and I believe not much else. I have not been following Ubuntu very much but by the information available on Wikipedia Ubuntu 14.04 seems somewhat similar yet the oldest version of Ubuntu supported is 15.10 (itself deprecated by Ubuntu as far as I can tell).

>>    I am looking for the information as the documentation suggests that Debian installs can be made to work but that same documentation states that those installs are neither tested nor supported.

>For ROS2, my guess would be that while the binaries are made to be compatible with Debian, OSRF only has a limited amount of resources to build and test the packages on the buildfarm, so the bulk of those resources go towards building for a single distribution.

I am asking these questions as the divergence between Debian and Ubuntu seems to be reaching  galactic proportions so although Ubuntu was (!!!) based on Debian there is little formal relationship between the two distros and even less similarity between the two when their perspectives are examined (Ubuntu as being supported by Canonical which is itself being positioned for an IPO). Perhaps it is time for ROS to start the transition to a different base operating system?





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