6 ms·

“Long term support” Unixes and versions of software in them

69 points by zdw 5y ago

dmitrygr 5y ago
> the people using them generally want the platonic ideal version of semantic versioning minor releases, namely updates that only fix bugs and improve things and never introduce backward compatibility problems or undesired changes Oh, so very much this! I would pay kilodollars per year for a real LTS version of firefox that will never ever change its UI or randomly break how plugins work, but take security fixes.
- blowski 5y ago
  What has changed so much in Firefox that you'd pay $1,000s of dollars per year to avoid it? Sounds like a business opportunity for someone.
  - squiffsquiff 5y ago
    What hasn't changed? There are many projects based on not following Mozilla's breaking changes https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork...
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > firefox that will never ever change its UI You should probably promote /customizable/ UI. It would be basic common sense, but given that I have seen Firefox versions use directly unbelievably insane UI, sheer lunacies - such as psychedelic progress bars in FF for Android -, good sense is what faults.
- rascul 5y ago
  > I would pay kilodollars per year for a real LTS version of firefox that will never ever change its UI or randomly break how plugins work, but take security fixes. Is this what Firefox ESR is supposed to be? I don't use it, does it change UI and plugin stuff with minor updates?
  - ainar-g 5y ago
    I guess, ESR misses the “ever” part in the parent comment. Once you update from Firefox 78 ESR to, say, Firefox 91 ESR, you get all the newest UI changes and all. There is a certain demand for “the boring UI”. Using as much of the native controls as possible in the browser UI, not moving things, not inventing new behaviour, and so on.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      So seamonkey? (But better maintained)
- hansel_der 5y ago
  tabkitv2 replacement any1? (vertical tabs with colorized grouping)
zerowellies 5y ago
Virtualisation is cheap. Docker + Debian - stable, with the official docker ppd - you're able to achieve a compromise of stability (and out of date packages) - while running fast moving projects that require later build tools than those available in the distribution.
- pornel 5y ago
  Docker to me is a proof that distro package management has failed. People would rather bundle a snapshot of an entire operating system with every application they use, instead of trying to install a compatible set of packages on the host OS.
  - zerowellies 5y ago
    Alpine Linux containers can be as low as 8MB in size. Virtualisation has a cost, that decreases every year. I disagree - many people want an efficient system where the package manager handles it - Arch linux. In my use case - I started running Arch Linux and installing the packages I want - however aarch64 w/ prop Mesa drivers = bad time. too few AUR packages has aarch64 binaries - would end up compiling nearly everything. eventually I snapped trying to build my own PKGBUILD for printer drivers (that worked on my arch/hardware) instead of just using the provided install script that had ubuntu aarch64 support. while a sleek minimalist system, ticking smoothly, is really nice - to get to that "happy place" on many bits of hardware can be tricky. this constantly getting stuck and having side effects across different programs on my system led to me taking the same approach I take deploying in production. just install stock os, get docker, then run docker compose pointing to your persisted config/data.
    - lazyier 5y ago
      Forcing everybody to use the latest versions is as anti-user as forcing them to use versions from 5 years ago. What people want is to develop and run their applications with the least amount of friction possible. That is the purpose of the operating system: make it easier to write and run applications. Anything that gets in the way of that is bad. What containers and other forms of virtualization provide is enhanced ability to deploy and run applications cheaper than without it. Linux kernel and modern networking is incredibly sophisticated and Unix design of the past can't allow people to take full advantage of it in a reasonable manner. This is why they switched to containers and virtual machines. Because, frankly, running one Linux operating per application actually makes more sense than what people were doing before. Package management systems, no matter how sophisticated, can't solve these problems.
necovek 5y ago
Going back as far as I remember, option 2 is exactly what has happened for distributions with long support. Eg. Debian maintainers have taken a particular release of upstream software, and if upstream didn't provide bugfixes for older releases, maintainers in Debian would backport them and Debian users would enjoy exactly what they want: stable versions with security fixes. Ubuntu LTS is exactly that as well, with a quicker release cadence (at least when it was introduced — was it 2006 with Hardy Heron? :). However, business entities (like Canonical) are trying to move away from supporting users to such an extent because it's very costly (thus snaps and reduced "main"). Even though everyone using a dependency now has to pay the cost at unexpected times (which is ultimately more costly than distros doing it), market was obviously not willing to reward developers like Canonical sufficiently for it to keep at it. RedHat is still doing it for their enterprise editions, but desktop users are being left out.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  > "It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shovelling back the tide." [ "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson ] What the customer wants here is impossible, but some customers (larger enterprises in particular) will pay handsomely for you to try. Why is it impossible? Change is the one constant in our universe. Long after there is no consciousness left to perceive it, change will continue. Red Hat are doing the same thing as Microsoft. You have a support programme, and then a more expensive extended support programme, and then sometimes yet a further even more expensive programme. Charging people for their over-confidence is a successful strategy, because every customer believes they are going to get off the old version in plenty of time, and many of them are wrong, but you don't care which ones. If Enterprise desktop users want to pay $$$ for longer term support they could make it worth Red Hat's money to do this work, shovelling back the tide. But I'd guess that Linux has far fewer cases of "desktop" systems that are actually servers. I know at work there were at least two "desktop" machines sat in empty offices over the pandemic, switched on with big "DO NOT SWITCH OFF" notices because the Windows "desktop" software running on them was vital to normal operations, even though that's clearly very stupid and the software ought to live on a server somewhere.
  - 5y ago

69 points by zdw 5y ago

> the people using them generally want the platonic ideal version of semantic versioning minor releases, namely updates that only fix bugs and improve things and never introduce backward compatibility problems or undesired changes Oh, so very much this! I would pay kilodollars per year for a real LTS version of firefox that will never ever change its UI or randomly break how plugins work, but take security fixes.

blowski 5y ago
What has changed so much in Firefox that you'd pay $1,000s of dollars per year to avoid it? Sounds like a business opportunity for someone.
- squiffsquiff 5y ago
  What hasn't changed? There are many projects based on not following Mozilla's breaking changes https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork...
mdp2021 5y ago
> firefox that will never ever change its UI You should probably promote /customizable/ UI. It would be basic common sense, but given that I have seen Firefox versions use directly unbelievably insane UI, sheer lunacies - such as psychedelic progress bars in FF for Android -, good sense is what faults.
rascul 5y ago
> I would pay kilodollars per year for a real LTS version of firefox that will never ever change its UI or randomly break how plugins work, but take security fixes. Is this what Firefox ESR is supposed to be? I don't use it, does it change UI and plugin stuff with minor updates?
- ainar-g 5y ago
  I guess, ESR misses the “ever” part in the parent comment. Once you update from Firefox 78 ESR to, say, Firefox 91 ESR, you get all the newest UI changes and all. There is a certain demand for “the boring UI”. Using as much of the native controls as possible in the browser UI, not moving things, not inventing new behaviour, and so on.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    So seamonkey? (But better maintained)
hansel_der 5y ago
tabkitv2 replacement any1? (vertical tabs with colorized grouping)

zerowellies 5y ago

Virtualisation is cheap. Docker + Debian - stable, with the official docker ppd - you're able to achieve a compromise of stability (and out of date packages) - while running fast moving projects that require later build tools than those available in the distribution.

pornel 5y ago
Docker to me is a proof that distro package management has failed. People would rather bundle a snapshot of an entire operating system with every application they use, instead of trying to install a compatible set of packages on the host OS.
- zerowellies 5y ago
  Alpine Linux containers can be as low as 8MB in size. Virtualisation has a cost, that decreases every year. I disagree - many people want an efficient system where the package manager handles it - Arch linux. In my use case - I started running Arch Linux and installing the packages I want - however aarch64 w/ prop Mesa drivers = bad time. too few AUR packages has aarch64 binaries - would end up compiling nearly everything. eventually I snapped trying to build my own PKGBUILD for printer drivers (that worked on my arch/hardware) instead of just using the provided install script that had ubuntu aarch64 support. while a sleek minimalist system, ticking smoothly, is really nice - to get to that "happy place" on many bits of hardware can be tricky. this constantly getting stuck and having side effects across different programs on my system led to me taking the same approach I take deploying in production. just install stock os, get docker, then run docker compose pointing to your persisted config/data.
  - lazyier 5y ago
    Forcing everybody to use the latest versions is as anti-user as forcing them to use versions from 5 years ago. What people want is to develop and run their applications with the least amount of friction possible. That is the purpose of the operating system: make it easier to write and run applications. Anything that gets in the way of that is bad. What containers and other forms of virtualization provide is enhanced ability to deploy and run applications cheaper than without it. Linux kernel and modern networking is incredibly sophisticated and Unix design of the past can't allow people to take full advantage of it in a reasonable manner. This is why they switched to containers and virtual machines. Because, frankly, running one Linux operating per application actually makes more sense than what people were doing before. Package management systems, no matter how sophisticated, can't solve these problems.

necovek 5y ago

Going back as far as I remember, option 2 is exactly what has happened for distributions with long support. Eg. Debian maintainers have taken a particular release of upstream software, and if upstream didn't provide bugfixes for older releases, maintainers in Debian would backport them and Debian users would enjoy exactly what they want: stable versions with security fixes. Ubuntu LTS is exactly that as well, with a quicker release cadence (at least when it was introduced — was it 2006 with Hardy Heron? :). However, business entities (like Canonical) are trying to move away from supporting users to such an extent because it's very costly (thus snaps and reduced "main"). Even though everyone using a dependency now has to pay the cost at unexpected times (which is ultimately more costly than distros doing it), market was obviously not willing to reward developers like Canonical sufficiently for it to keep at it. RedHat is still doing it for their enterprise editions, but desktop users are being left out.

tialaramex 5y ago
> "It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shovelling back the tide." [ "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson ] What the customer wants here is impossible, but some customers (larger enterprises in particular) will pay handsomely for you to try. Why is it impossible? Change is the one constant in our universe. Long after there is no consciousness left to perceive it, change will continue. Red Hat are doing the same thing as Microsoft. You have a support programme, and then a more expensive extended support programme, and then sometimes yet a further even more expensive programme. Charging people for their over-confidence is a successful strategy, because every customer believes they are going to get off the old version in plenty of time, and many of them are wrong, but you don't care which ones. If Enterprise desktop users want to pay $$$ for longer term support they could make it worth Red Hat's money to do this work, shovelling back the tide. But I'd guess that Linux has far fewer cases of "desktop" systems that are actually servers. I know at work there were at least two "desktop" machines sat in empty offices over the pandemic, switched on with big "DO NOT SWITCH OFF" notices because the Windows "desktop" software running on them was vital to normal operations, even though that's clearly very stupid and the software ought to live on a server somewhere.
- 5y ago