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> As a developer, I'm fine with 3 years of support, security or otherwise. There's the problem: developers primarily think of themselves, expecting end users t

> As a developer, I'm fine with 3 years of support, security or otherwise. There's the problem: developers primarily think of themselves, expecting end users to be power users not unlike developers. That doesn't hold. Developers can handle change & a rapid upgrade cycle. End users... not so much. Or not at all. The only updates end users care for are risk-free, invisible, hassle-free (as in: automatic) updates that plug security holes, correct broken functionality, or minor feature updates that don't interfere with anything already there. For example drivers that support new hardware which uses existing system bus w/ existing software infrastructure. Update can't fit into this frame? Then put it in next, feature-breaking release. Not in currently-stable, supported one. Imho, Linux currently has a pressing need for community maintained distro with 10y+ LTS cycle. Or existing distro that offers 10y+ support on selected releases. Such distro could easily send RHEL into obscurity.

jimhefferon 3y ago
I'll add that even for developers or power users, very few are in that category for more than a couple of areas. There are some things I know about but that leaves 99 percent of my box where I'm relying on others.
jart 3y ago
What you're basically saying is you want developers to volunteer to give up their ability to advance their own careers writing features, and only fix security bugs in old junk that isn't entirely broken instead. You'd have better luck getting them to volunteer to be maids. If you want long-term community-driven support, then you'll stand a better chance getting it from developers focusing on making new things that are backwards compatible, rather than asking maintainers to keep old stuff alive forever. For example, Cosmopolitan Libc uses modern GCC11 to build binaries that support running on every distro all the way back to RHEL5, and I think that's the thing you actually want, except it's something you'll never see happen from distros, because they operate by a different set of incentives.

jimhefferon 3y ago

I'll add that even for developers or power users, very few are in that category for more than a couple of areas. There are some things I know about but that leaves 99 percent of my box where I'm relying on others.

jart 3y ago

What you're basically saying is you want developers to volunteer to give up their ability to advance their own careers writing features, and only fix security bugs in old junk that isn't entirely broken instead. You'd have better luck getting them to volunteer to be maids. If you want long-term community-driven support, then you'll stand a better chance getting it from developers focusing on making new things that are backwards compatible, rather than asking maintainers to keep old stuff alive forever. For example, Cosmopolitan Libc uses modern GCC11 to build binaries that support running on every distro all the way back to RHEL5, and I think that's the thing you actually want, except it's something you'll never see happen from distros, because they operate by a different set of incentives.