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>i wish they add 10 years lts though I really don't get this fascination with 10 year LTS. Why is it so hard to upgrade in half a decade ? I mean this is such

>i wish they add 10 years lts though I really don't get this fascination with 10 year LTS. Why is it so hard to upgrade in half a decade ? I mean this is such an arbitrary number. If RHEL started offering 50 year support, people will complain that Debian is 1/10th of RHEL.

jmnicolas 6y ago
I'd take 50 years in a heartbeat. I'm barely Linux literate and I have many many more pressing things to do than upgrade servers. If you want to know more I wrote about it in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348914
cesarb 6y ago
> I really don't get this fascination with 10 year LTS. Why is it so hard to upgrade in half a decade ? The ideal situation is never having to upgrade: you buy your computer, install the operating system, and it works the same until you retire it. If your computer has a 5 year warranty, you expect to use it for at least 5 years before retiring it. A 5 year LTS is only 5 years if you install the moment it's released, but that's not usually the case; for instance, there's a new Ubuntu LTS release every 2 years, so in the worst case your LTS installation will last only 3 years. Now consider the "10 year" RHEL LTS: in the worst case (you installed RHEL 7 just before RHEL 8 was released), your LTS installation will last 5 years, perfectly matching the warranty period.
Veen 6y ago
Imagine you're a web hosting provider who builds their business around automation tools and control panels and whatnot tailored for CentOS 8. You really don't want to have to rewrite it all every couple of years because that's not where your business's value comes from. Also, updating will break a huge number of your customers' sites and apps, which will piss them off and bury your already slender profit margins in support costs. Most of those hosting customers are not tech companies building fractionally "innovative" CRUD SaaS apps. They're SMEs who use their apps and databases to do real work: organizing their employees, procurement, running payroll, managing delivery routes, order and stock management — boring stuff like that. They very much do not want to have to significantly rewrite the back-office systems their businesses rely on because the OS changed under them. They want it to keep working for decades with as little redevelopment as possible.

jmnicolas 6y ago

I'd take 50 years in a heartbeat. I'm barely Linux literate and I have many many more pressing things to do than upgrade servers. If you want to know more I wrote about it in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348914

cesarb 6y ago

> I really don't get this fascination with 10 year LTS. Why is it so hard to upgrade in half a decade ? The ideal situation is never having to upgrade: you buy your computer, install the operating system, and it works the same until you retire it. If your computer has a 5 year warranty, you expect to use it for at least 5 years before retiring it. A 5 year LTS is only 5 years if you install the moment it's released, but that's not usually the case; for instance, there's a new Ubuntu LTS release every 2 years, so in the worst case your LTS installation will last only 3 years. Now consider the "10 year" RHEL LTS: in the worst case (you installed RHEL 7 just before RHEL 8 was released), your LTS installation will last 5 years, perfectly matching the warranty period.

Veen 6y ago

Imagine you're a web hosting provider who builds their business around automation tools and control panels and whatnot tailored for CentOS 8. You really don't want to have to rewrite it all every couple of years because that's not where your business's value comes from. Also, updating will break a huge number of your customers' sites and apps, which will piss them off and bury your already slender profit margins in support costs. Most of those hosting customers are not tech companies building fractionally "innovative" CRUD SaaS apps. They're SMEs who use their apps and databases to do real work: organizing their employees, procurement, running payroll, managing delivery routes, order and stock management — boring stuff like that. They very much do not want to have to significantly rewrite the back-office systems their businesses rely on because the OS changed under them. They want it to keep working for decades with as little redevelopment as possible.