Question on stability on LTS versions

As far as I understand, non-LTS appear more popular because they are the first anyone sees when going to Unity websites. I am using LTS versions as I'm not keen on dealing with bugs & spending too much time reporting the issue to the unity team. However, I notice that there's also some instability although LTS are supposed to be more stable. Non-critical issues like font not detected or inconsistent performance seem to take place. Does anyone else have this problem? My scenario is:

1 - I do not start by using a non-LTS. All starts with LTS.
2 - Upgrade is not done unless the existing LTS app suddenly fails or cannot perform for no reason. Let me be really clear: The app works perfectly well when I shutdown unity editor & hub. Later or the following day when I start up my project, certain things like size, font or some other thing suddenly disappear, or just don't work. There's no proper explanation for this. My project is not shared with anyone so no need to imagine theoretical possibilities of being modified by anyone.

3 - Upgrade is only done when I cannot fix or understand what the issue is. Depending on the issue, I might visit the unity forum or just check the internet.

@dgoyette, You can consider this a follow up on the previous thread. Any ideas?

 

LTS releases are kind of an interesting mix. Recently christened LTS releases are no more stable than the immediately prior version of Unity. For example, when 2019.4 LTS is released in the next month or two (most likely), it will just be a renamed 2019.3. At the moment the first "LTS" release for a given year is released, it's barely different than the previous dot version. The difference comes in the long-term attention the release will continue to get over the span of the next two years.

The intent is that the stability of the LTS release should increase over time compared to earlier patch releases of that LTS release. That is, we can probably expect that 2018.4.15 LTS is more "stable" than 2018.4.5 LTS, given that it's received many more patched to fix bugs. But how stable it is compared to other LTS releases from other years is not clear. On the one hand, Unity backports bug fixes to earlier LTS versions. But I doubt they necessarily will if a backport is particular complicated to perform. Hypothetically speaking, let's say it's relatively easy to fix a certain bug in 2019.4 LTS due to changes in the engine, and very hard to fix it in 2018.4 LTS. It's possible that the fix won't be backported to 2018.4 LTS. In that very narrow sense, for one particular use case, you might consider 2019.4 LTS more "stable" than 2018.4 LTS.

So on the one hand, the longer an LTS release has been around, the more "hardened" it gets. On the other hand, it's possible that backported bug fixes can be too complex to be worth the effort, so it's possible some functionality will be fixed in later versions that can't be feasibly fixed in older versions, despite the LTS tag.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on this, and I don't even have specifics to back up my speculation. I'd mainly say, go with the most recent LTS version of Unity that has the features you want. But recognize that "stability" is illusive. I use Unity all day, every day. Regardless of what version I use, I expect the Editor to crash a couple of times per day. That used to bother me, but now I shrug it off. I HIGHLY recommend finding and use an AutoSave script, which saved any time you enter play mode. You can find a working on in this thread, towards the bottom: https://forum.unity.com/threads/we-need-auto-save-feature.483853/ That's basically the only reason I tolerate Unity crashing. In almost all cases, Unity crashes when entering or exiting Play mode for me. So, as long as I've saved the scene before entering Play mode (which that script does), it's extremely rare for me to lose any work due to a crash. I just lose the minute or so it takes to reopen Unity.

 

A big thank you. I don't normally check unity forum because many of the things are very technical for me. I am busy on my project and don't want to spend time searching if the game engine might have changed as you mentioned. If you happen to have the link, I'll be happy if you have time sharing it.

 

What link, specifically, did you mean?

As far as deciding whether to switch to a different Unity version, I usually try to do that right away if the release has some functionality I want. I'll tentative upgrade the Unity version, and then test for problems. If I find any show-stoppers, I'll report the bug, then revert the upgrade and continue on the old version until all the critical bugs in the new version are fixed.

While I'm waiting for the bug fix(es), I keep an eye on the following two threads:

• https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-tech-release-announcements.532033/page-2
• https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-lts-release-announcements.529171/page-2

I "watch" those to threads to get notified of new releases, then I look at the patch notes each time. If the patch notes indicate that the bug I'm waiting on has been fixed, I'll do the tentative upgrade again and give it another try. it's a bit of a process depending on how many bugs there are and how significant they are to me. The patch notes can definitely be technical, but usually the fixes list the issue tracking number of the bug I'm waiting for, so it's pretty easy to determine if something has been fixed.

 

I know about this. I have seen the list before. You must not forget that this does not guarantee stability. I know this because I've seen strange issues even is more recent LTS versions so new issues doesn't surprise me.

 

Anything that unity does to improve stablility is a winner for me. Sometimes we forget just how complex the unity eco system is and how much they need to keep compatible and working. Its so easy to expect bullet proof stability but game engines R&D pushing out into stable integrations is a tough tough business. So thumbs up to unity for this approach.