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Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 lifecycle extended to ten years
- underscore_ku 5y agogreat!
- janmayan 5y agoNice one!
- 0x000000001 5y agoTerrible news. This will hold back progress like usual. We need shorter release cycles with less risky upgrade paths, not this nonsense.
- JshWright 5y agoThis way Canonical can keep charging for ESM contracts... Gotta get that sweet legacy maintenance revenue.
- kyrofa 5y agoYou have options if you want something like that. Use a rolling release distribution like Arch. For commercial use, this ESM model is spot on.
- zamadatix 5y agoCompanies on extended support releases of versions distros want a specific version of packages with security patches for a product lifecycle not an increased frequency of OS changes.
- moralestapia 5y agoSorry to break it to you, but plenty of people prefer stability over novelty.
- awill 5y agoI think it's a little more nuanced than that. If I'm building something new, I generally want a new kernel/OS underneath. Especially if what I'm building can take advantage of it (improvements to filesystems, networking stack etc..). After I've launched my service, I want stability over everything else. So here, I'd launch on the newest Ubuntu available, and stick with it for quite a long time.
- moralestapia 5y ago>I generally want a new kernel/OS underneath Huh? That's weird, Linux, OSX and Windows kernels have been battle-tested and hardened for like 30 years or so now. I can't imagine what kind of application would need a different kernel to start with. Aside from security concerns (which you didn't mention, plus one could argue an LTS is safer), could you give a specific example of: >what I'm building can take advantage of it (improvements to filesystems, networking stack etc..)
- orf 5y agoio_uring is one example, among many.
- moralestapia 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745275 Is it really worth it to jump into a completely new feature to get marginal improvements on the most basic stuff (io, networking, etc...), all of this, in exchange of working with unstable APIs and unproven security vectors? My answer is no but I can picture people who would say yes. I guess it's a matter of personal preference (plus I work on stuff that has to be reliable, above everything else).
- orf 5y agoIt depends on what you’re building?
- stusmall 5y agoYou have the option to do that. Keep up on the most recent Ubuntu. It's easier and saves you money and pain in the long run. Hopefully whatever train wrecks of organizations that need 14.04 are paying enough in support contract to help subsidize Canonical for the rest of us.
- tomc1985 5y agoDear god no. If upgrade cycles slow down to like 3x what they are I'd be quite happy
- handrous 5y agoWhat progress is it holding back?
- ch_123 5y agoThis way, Canonical gets paid by the people who want to stay on old versions - meaning more investment in new versions. I strongly suspect that this long-term support costs the customer a lot more than it costs Canonical to support the old versions
- dleslie 5y agoOn the Linux Desktop, we'd have shorter release cycles with less risky upgrade paths if it weren't for the belligerence of the Gnome development team.
- Zababa 5y ago> We need shorter release cycles with less risky upgrade paths, not this nonsense. Why do "we" need shorter release cycles?
- ghshephard 5y agoGood lord no - if I can run my current laptop for 10 years on 20.04 - I'll be more than happy to do so. I want innovation in my own code, my applications, browsers - not my Operating System/BIOS/UEFI/etc... Save the new operating systems for new hardware, bus standards, innovative GUIs, etc... Let me just keep pounding away 12-hours/day without a hiccup on my current gear.
- Arnavion 5y ago>I want innovation in my own code, my applications, browsers - not my Operating System/BIOS/UEFI/etc... So either your applications and browsers come from the distro's package repo, in which case when their upstreams update to newer versions that require newer dependencies your distro doesn't have, your distro will be stuck on older versions lacking the innovation you seek. Or you use flatpaks or snaps, which don't have that problem because the flatpak / snap bundles the newer libraries, but then the stability of the OS doesn't help you. And you're still stuck with an old flatpak / snap daemon that could cause problems with new flatpaks / snaps, and with an old kernel that could be missing syscalls that the newer libc's inside the flatpaks / snaps require. Eg I remember discovering that 16.04 and earlier don't have the getrandom syscall, which made it impossible to run a newer OS's Docker container since its libc expected it. To be clear, I'm all for people wanting to remain on supported OSes for a decade. I'm just pointing out that expecting "innovation" is incompatible with that.
- The_Colonel 5y ago> I'm just pointing out that expecting "innovation" is incompatible with that. No, it's not. There's a huge difference between "let me update these 2 apps which I care about" and having to upgrade the whole system to get those 2 new updated apps.
- Arnavion 5y agoPerhaps you should read the two preceding paragraphs to see the problem with that expectation instead of assuming the third paragraph was written in isolation.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoThe majority of commercial enterprise doesn't upgrade on a whim. My company was still using Windows 7 this year.
- amalantony06 5y agoDoesn't Debian do exactly what you've said?
- cies 5y ago> We need shorter release cycles with less risky upgrade paths Either you speak for yourself or you have no clue how a market works. Long term support i know to be paid for by enterprise: hence there IS demand.
- salamander014 5y agoGenerally speaking I agree we need to force the rest of the industry into a more ephemeral mindset for infrastructure. BUT this looks like it is only for ESM, which you need an Ubuntu Advantage subscription for. If that's the case, then this makes sense. Let Canonical make some more money off those who are willing to pay, big enterprises are slow to do anything.
- input_sh 5y agoUbuntu Advantage is also free for personal use (for a few devices), so you can take advantage of that if you're not a business and are too lazy to update every couple of years.
- superkuh 5y agoI'm a home Ubuntu and Debian desktop user. I've been using the free Ubuntu 14.04 ESM support since LTS support dropped. I've been fairly happy with it. Using an old distro with it's old shared libs and old compilers is definitely not for the normal home user ubuntu demographic that wants things to work easily. But for curmedgeons that hate change and can deal with editing some cmake/etc and source header lines here and there it's liberating. I'd like to use Debian more but 5 years just isn't enough.
- darkwater 5y agoMay I ask for your line of reasoning here? I always thought people don't want to update to avoid doing the extra work, but if you go down manual patching and compiling a software to make it work with an older OS version, that doesn't look like saving time, at least at first sight.
- superkuh 5y agoI like to keep hardware systems with their contemporary software. If my compiler and libs become so old as to become annoyingly restrictive I eventually assemble a new computer with new software and add it to the mouse/keyboard sharing span. But that doesn't mean I want to get rid of the system I've built up. You can say, "Use a VM for old software" but a well broken in box makes things a lot simpler. A new computer every 5-10 years isn't that demanding. I have physical machines for the gtk1, gtk2, gtk3, and now gtk4 eras that I still use every day. There are also cases where modern versions of software are not better. Text to speech software is really important to me and Festival TTS modern versions (1.9 vs 2.0) just don't have good sounding voices. Luckily I still have my Ubuntu 10.04 box around to do that task. Canonical keeping the base system stable and secure so I can build my source compiled userspace sand castles on top without constant (ie, every couple years) breakage is great.
- Blueskytech 5y agoJust like everyone else seems to think, this is the monetization model I can get behind.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoDoes that mean there will be another ten years of 32-bit support, or is that already out of 14.04 at this point?
- awill 5y agoI'm not an Ubuntu user (CentOS 7 on my server, will probably move to Rocky 9 when that releases), but it's easy to see why Ubuntu has been successful. RHEL has 10y support, but historically has released their OS every 4-5 years, which is far too long. Imagine you're releasing a new product 4 years after the last RHEL. If you're doing anything with an area that has a lot of kernel/OS innovation, you're miles behind. With Debian, I believe it's confusing what their extended support is. They don't guarantee more than 3 years, but usually extend it later. That makes sense for Debian, but not for businesses that need to decide on an OS for their project. Then comes Ubuntu. Totally free without having to resort to third party rebuilds (like Rocky) with 5 years of support. And you can pay for 10y support. It's not surprising Ubuntu is way ahead of RHEL on public clouds. Red Hat should be doing more to target the startup scene. Those are the enterprises of the future.
- jmnicolas 5y agoI'm still salty about the Centos 8 debacle, this increased my work load a lot. Will never touch anything Red Hat again.
- ikiris 5y agoRed hat set their user base on fire with their centos debacle whether they admit it or not.
- da_chicken 5y agoLook, IBM has to start navigating that product into a mountainside at some point. It's always best to start with user goodwill so the knowledgeable individuals start bailing out. They have to get the number of experts down to a level where IBM has most of them under contract to their customers. That way in 20 years they can cease real support and development while still getting millions in annual revenue.
- hughrr 5y agoThis is sickeningly accurate and hurt to read.
- superflit2 5y agoThanks I got the gist that "We cannot support old SW for so long" but that action makes things more manageable to upgrade. I have several SWs that are hard-depended on the OS version.
- marcodiego 5y agoThis is microsoft-like in terms of how long the system is supported. Hats off to Canonical. Also, there is a way to "cheat" if you have 16.04 on your desktop and still wants security updates: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/09/ubuntu-16-04-security-updates-esm-for-free https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/09/ubuntu-16-04-security-up... Note that 16.04 is reasonably well supported on modern hardware because of hardware enablement updates and you can use modern software with snaps, appimages and flatpak.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoI like Ubuntu's LTS releases, and prefer upgrading from/to each one. For some reason I skipped 18.04 though.
- Havoc 5y agoI mean if there is demand why not. They presumably already have the skill and capacity so can just keep trucking