Ubuntu 20.04 LTS support?

[youngpm]

I was curious how long it usually takes to get support out for a new LTS? I'm currently using 19.10, and the manual patching of the kernel scares me off.

Alternatively, what are the downsides to using the "RSUSB" backend? Just performance?

Thanks!

[ev-mp]

@youngpm hello,
Regarding Ubuntu 20 LTS - the official Ubuntu page is yet silent about a concrete date, while April 2020 would hardly come as a surprise for anyone given that both Ubuntu 16 and 18 were released in April of 2016 and 2018 respectively. We are also monitoring the situation to realign the SDK to new Ubuntu LTS when it goes public.

As for switching to RSUSB backend - first you need to establish whether the kernel patches are essential for the usage, as with Ubuntu 18+ the hardware timestamps, which (imho) are the most common and also anticipated metadata usage, are already built in and do not required any patches.
The RSUSB is quite a new infrastructure that tries to address some of the issues that were part of the previously-used libuvc package. See #5212 for more details.