As much flak as they catch, you gotta hand it to Ubuntu for offering up to 12 years of support to companies willing to pay for it. It doesn’t make sense for anything but a paid service, but dang is it impressive.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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The problem with that is that the rest of the ecosystem keeps moving on, and the more time passes the more left behind you are. So you stick with old versions of whatever you use and when the time comes to upgrade it hurts even more because it's not just the OS that works differently but also all the software you're using including Python, Ruby, PHP, NodeJS or whatever your software stack is built on. So you have to upgrade all of that code too. At some point you might as well start over from scratch which just makes it even harder and daunting to tackle to you increasingly push it further until you hit the 12 years and you're forced to do it with time constraints
The proper solution to critical systems you're too afraid to upgrade is to... upgrade and redeploy them more often in test environments so you're not afraid of upgrading the system. And the very companies that would pay for the 12 years of support are the ones that really should have the whole thing fully automated and fully tested.
I could see an argument for companies that work with healthcare or government that have to have systems / software specifically audited / vetted / approved before use. But yeah you’re absolutely right, getting that far behind the times sounds like a nightmare when it does finally go EOL.
The longer you wait the harder it is
Starting in July, Debian will not provide further security updates for Debian 10. A subset of buster packages will be supported by external parties. Detailed information can be found at Extended LTS.
The project is managed by Freexian. Their customers decide the scope of supported packages but updates and security fixes will be available for all Debian users without cost.
So basically, as veryoldoldstable it will be kept alive for another five years.
New to Linux: in which case would you stick with an "old-old-stable" release?
Software incompatibility?
The case is: You switched to it before it was "old-old-stable" and haven't updated.
Causes for this are likely:
- Software hasn't been tested on new version
- Software hasn't been updated to work on new version
- Needs revalidation for some specific certification
- Lazy
- Lazy
the only honest answer.
“I forgot about that computer and now all of the repos are offline.” is also real.
Makes sense, thanks.
When infrastructure gets forgotten about. That is especially easy in virtualized environments