Would it be more optimal if Unity has the same version pattern like Unreal? Every incremental build is considered stable for production with only 3 or 4 hotfixes if needed. New features and bug fixes would outweight regressions.
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Even assuming it’s a significant contributing factor, changing a numbering scheme won’t magically result in features and bug fixes outweighing regressions.
True, but i suppose that the point @Neto_Kokku was making is that LTS needs to actually stand for its name.
Holy shit
We just downloaded 2021.7 to try get some relief and suddenly our UI just turns off
Im looking at the patchnotes again and see this
How did this go live. Now our UI is just dissapearing.
Who puts a “fix” patch live with such a huge glaring issue…
Unity bug department rn
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Okay, but that still doesn’t say anything about stability. Just that it’s the previous TECH release getting extended support. LTS stands for Long Term Support not Long Term Stability. Any claims to stability are what we’ve been placing on it ourselves. I know I’m just as guilty of doing it too in past discussions.
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It does. The name does not mention or imply stability.
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I know that. My grief is that you don’t often see multiple blocking issues get introduced between minor versions, but on a fresh LTS it’s been pretty much a given. It feels like a larger amount of code changes gets pushed into the fresh LTS compared to what goes between minor Unity releases.
But again, it could also be because more developers wait for the LTS and skip TECH releases (specially those with ongoing complex projects and longer dev cycles that need to play it safe). Since Unity has been relying too heavily on user reporting for QA all those bugs that show up in the LTS could actually have been there all along, waiting for a poor sod to trip on them and have their work be disrupted enough to warrant a bug report.
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To a degree I’d say LTS is what you should chose when you start a project now. By the time it’s launch time, it is realiably long term stable.
Don’t switch Unity version in the last third of your project… Fairly sure people with Unreal and most other engines don’t do that either.
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That’s demonstrably not the experience people are having.
It’s pure luck that my own current project picked 2021.3.5. It’s behaving well for us, but likely it all comes down to what parts of the engine a particular project pokes more than others.
LTS 2021 is only out for about 3 months. No dev is thinking about release now if they started with 21 as I suggested.
If you don’t expect it to work reliably 3 months in, then what exactly did you mean when you called it “reliably long term stable”?
Or, in different words, is nuking peoples’ GUIs after 3 months your idea of “reliably long term stable”?
Edit: To clarify, I’ll happily forgive mistakes when they’re handled well, and anyone looking at upgrading stuff should likely have done enough of their own testing to spot this (edit: actually, I can easily imagine edge cases where it could slip through). But this is the second LTS release with the same issue, so I think the question raised about what’s going on is a pretty reasonable one in this case.
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The name doesn’t, but the description below it does… That said, stability doesn’t mean it wont have any bug, but (I guess) it’s just that it wont have new feature, which usually comes with a lot of bugs and other instability…
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… and the maximum of two small numbers is still a small number. 
Plus, indeed, see earlier discussion re: what “stability” can mean.
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“Long-term support (LTS) is a product lifecycle management policy in which a stable release of computer software is maintained for a longer period of time than the standard edition.” unless Unity has its own definition…
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Our two biggest issue we have reported on June 2nd.
The Recompile After Finished Playing bug was set to “Under Review” 3 weeks ago, otherwise no reaction.
Our other big issue was Decal Projectors triggering error spam when exiting prefab edit mode with decals in it.
We ranted about it in the forums and the HDRP team picked it up & fixed it on their side within 2 weeks, the fix for this has not been publicly released yet. Fortunately they wrote in the forum how to fix the package yourself.
It is clear that the actual devs themselves are doing a great job, however the overall release system has huge problems.
Using the forums to get critical issues sorted so far has been much more time effective.
Given that it takes months to get simple bugs officially sorted out (Decal Projector issue is literally 4 lines of code and was fixed within days), starting a production on a version that has < 1 year support is a giant risk.
On the other hand, using the current LTS essentially forces you to work with what should be an early beta version, where every other release is completely broken, case and point UI bugs in 2021.3.7.
In our case our full release will be somewhere around 2020 deprecation date. If we are still on it and run into any kind of issue (for example we haven’t completed console port yet), we are screwed.
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Interesting… I’ve found 2021 LTS to be the most stable in a long time. But I’m on 2021.3.4 so there is that
Create a list of custom struct or class and notice how the collection Inspector is completely broken and unusable for collections with multiple items. A major bug they introduced in 2021.3.3 and didn’t fix for 2021.3.4, then back ported the bug to 2020.3.35 and finally managed to address it in 2021.3.5. Not sure when they fixed it for 2020 but I’m not upgrading past 2020.3.34 right now due to this nonsense. Needless to say this made the engine completely unusable on our end, as we manage a lot of data this way.
EDIT: Image courtesy of forum user pkessler94
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