This seems like a colossal mess waiting to happen. I'm glad that I read their plan, so that I can completely avoid it.
The allure of Ubuntu LTS releases (currently 12.04 and 14.04) is the extended support cycle -- practically speaking the kernel is the biggest component of this for a lot of people.
If you use the 3.16 kernel (from Ubuntu 14.10) on 14.04, you are now on a 6 month support cycle [1]. One which doesn't even have defined dates (they're all still TBD). Now you have to keep running on the kernel upgrade treadmill to maintain support, moving to backported kernels from progressively newer Ubuntu releases every 6 months.
> practically speaking the kernel is the biggest component of this for a lot of people.
Really? I mean, step back from your initial gut reaction and ask yourself how many software developers could even name which version of the kernel their code runs on without checking. Most developers never make a syscall directly and, increasingly, aren't even calling something like libc directly because they use higher-level libraries.
Sure, some people really care cause they recently hit an issue with specific drivers and a few people are using a really new feature, but that's a much smaller group than the number of people running code which doesn't even depend on Linux, much less a specific point release.
Looking at the release notes, I'd say there are a LOT more people affected by real bugs which are fixed in 14.04.2 than will be affected by hypothetical bugs nobody seems to have noticed yet:
Overreacting much? The shortened support is limited to the packages you upgrade. It's a 9 month cycle with a new version available every in 6 months. Most importantly, these are just packages, they can be uninstalled of they don't work and you fall back to LTS versions. And this is all the same for 12.04.
For some reason, Chrome seems to work fine with extensions on my Ubuntu 14.04, kernel 3.13.
I agree with those saying this is completely stupid. In corporate environments, there are a lot of Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, and CentOS desktops. They won't be upgraded to >= 3.16 for years.
Apparently, Ubuntu 14.04.2 installs a 3.16 kernel by default, and previous 14.04 installs can be updated by installing a bunch of "*-utopic" packages.