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Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on
- therealfiona 11mo agoHow many customers did this take? Wow...
- unsnap_biceps 11mo agoIt could just have been one with a very large check.
- MiddleEndian 11mo agoIt doesn't seem unreasonable to me if you have the resources. If I could've paid Apple to somehow just support OS X 10.6 forever I'd probably still be a Mac/Hackintosh user lol
- paulddraper 11mo agoThere’s at least one customer somewhere willing to pay $1 million for that. Plus adding a general feeling of confidence to the product as a whole. And safety knowing that you can upgrade for an extra 5 years of support if you need it.
- odie5533 11mo agoThe level of confidence is pretty incredible. Coming from someone who got hurt by CentOS.
- naniwaduni 11mo agoOne of the dirty secrets is that you don't need to back up confidence to sell it if you don't plan to be around when it falls apart.
- oblio 11mo agoCanonical has been around for 20+ years. It's not 150 years, but it's still something.
- the_why_of_y 11mo agoI don't understand your point, CentOS never had paying customers?
- ycombinete 11mo agoThese kinds of demands are becoming more common in b2b software.
- Animats 11mo agoNice. Should be mandatory for home automation systems. Support must outlive the home warranty.
- bradfa 11mo agoHome automation customers (the end users) probably are going to balk at the yearly subscription price of Ubuntu Pro. Especially for gadgets that likely cost less to buy upfront than a single year of Ubuntu Pro.
- superkuh 11mo agoI've used Canonical's free 3-seat extended service mantainence (ESM) support on my one 14.04 LTS machine for a long time. It's so nice having a stable target for more than decade for my personal projects. I have so much software defined radio software that absolutely does break in ways I can't fix on a newer version of any Debian-alike. The ESM program has been a provider of peace of mind when still leaving that SDR machine connected to the internet and running javascript. >30-day trial for enterprises. Always free for personal use. >Free, personal subscription for 5 machines for you or any business you own This "Pro" program also being free is a suprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
- cpncrunch 11mo agoIts unclear if this legacy patch will be free for personal use.
- nebula8804 11mo agoThe person having to maintain this must be in a world of hurt. Unless they found someone who really likes doing this kind of thing? Still, maintaining such an old codebase while the rest of the world moves on...ugh...
- SoftTalker 11mo agoSome people just want a job, they don’t wrap up their sense of self worth in it.
- lukan 11mo agoNothing to do with self worth, it is a meaningful job, but a fun one?
- cyber_kinetist 11mo agoNot all jobs are fun, but they can be bearable if meaningful enough (whether that being useful for other people, or even just provide a living wage to support your family)
- wjnc 11mo agoClear mission, a well set up team and autonomy in execution can make most jobs fun to do? Stress (due to), lack of autonomy, lack of clear mission and bad teams and management I think are the root of unhappy work?
- pram 11mo agoOn the other hand: dealing with 14.04 is practically cutting edge compared to stuff still using AIX and HPUX, which were outdated even 20 years ago lol
- wkat4242 11mo agoIt's because they stopped development in the late 90s. Before Windows 95 (Chicago) came out, HP-UX with VUE was really cutting edge. IBM kinda screwed it up when they created CDE out of it though. And besides the GUI, all unixes were way more cutting edge than anything windows except NT. Only when that went mainstream with XP it became serious. I know your 20 year timeframe is after XP's release, but I just wanted to point out there was a time when the unixes were way ahead. You could even get common software like WP, Lotus 123 and even internet explorer and the consumer outlook (i forget the name) for them in the late 90s.
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- benatkin 11mo agoThis gives me a good sense of how old these versions are: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-for-developers/reference/availability/python/ https://documentation.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-for-developers/refer... 14.04 LTS has Python 3.4 as well as Python 2.7.
- tech234a 11mo agoThe last patch for Python 2.7 was released in 2020 (https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-2718/ https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-2718/)
- apelapan 11mo agoThat is the last 2.7 patch from PSF. Other reputable organizations keep making new patch releases for as long as there are paying customers. Not just the big legacy distros. E.g. https://github.com/ActiveState/cpython https://github.com/ActiveState/cpython There are others.
- Vortigaunt 11mo agoFrom what a quick google search told me, RHEL caps out at 13 years.[0] I'm curious what caused Canonical to offer 2 more years of lts support than Red Hat? [0]https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata
- worthless-trash 11mo agoI know that there is still rhel6 customers in contract, that was 2010.
- kobbs 11mo agoThe "Extended Life Cycle Support Long-Life Add-On" could carry RHEL6 until 12/2027, according to https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata.
- perlgeek 11mo agoI don't have any insider knowledge, but it's not hard to imagine a customer with a fleet of machines that will run out of LTS soon. The project that replaces them is already on its way, but of course delayed. So now, what do they do? Spend thousands of hours upgrading the soon-to-be-replaced fleet anyway, or ask their vendor if they could, pretty please, extend LTS for another two years? If Ubuntu can spread the cost between enough (or large enough) customers, why not?
- k_bx 11mo agoI'm now deploying all my projects in Incus container (LXC). My base system is upgradeable, ZFS-based, in future will be IncusOS but now just Ubuntu. Incus is connected in cluster so I can: backup/copy projects, move between machines etc. Containers reuse host system's new kernel, while inside I get Ubuntu 22.04. I don't see a good reason, if 22.04 will get 15-year life support, to upgrade it much. It's a perfect combination for me, keeping the project on 22.04 essentially forever, as long as my 22.04 build-container can still build the new version.
- HansHamster 11mo agoIsn't Incus/LXD separate from and running on top of LXC? People sometimes seem to use the names interchangeably which can be annoying because I run just plain LXC but when looking stuff up and come across "this is how you do XYZ on LXC" they are actually talking about LXD and it doesn't really apply. I can't recall what is was last time, but this has happened a couple of times already...
- k_bx 11mo agoMaybe, I'm a noob for now. Meaning Incus, LXC being the underlying tech.
- dotancohen 11mo agoSell it to me! Why not docker?
- k_bx 11mo agoIt's a container with full os: systemd, journald, tailscale, ssh inside. No need to learn new docker world, just install the deb with your software inside In a cluster mode, you can move container into another machine without downtime, back it up in full etc., also via one command. In theory when using ZFS or btrfs you can do incremental backup of the snapshot (send the diff only), but I never tried it.
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- littlestymaar 11mo agoWhat's the only HN user group that's more annoying than the Rust evangelical strike force: the anti-Rust butthurt crusade.
- gclawes 11mo agoNo the rust guys are more annoying. We just want shit to keep working...
- Xylakant 11mo agoSo the problem you’re running into is the question of whether support for old architectures should indefinitely hold back the adoption of new features or languages in future kernel versions. Rust in the kernel was added as a way for developers to explore whether the tradeoff between not supporting all future capabilities and adopting a more modern programming language works out. Nothing in the kernel core uses and relies on Rust so far, and to the best of my knowledge, no adoption of Rust in any of these places is planned as of today. So the use of Rust is limited to places which are of zero interest to older architectures. And it’s also not like the old kernel versions are going away. It’s perfectly viable for maintainers of old hardware to remain on older versions of the kernel. OTOH, there is a desire from a group of kernel developers to implement to implement the code they contribute to the project in Rust. The want new shit to be working, and write support for it in a language they consider suitable for implementing the support faster, more maintainable and safer than in C. Should those people be held back by architecture support for architectures that haven’t seen new hardware in decades? Would that imply that the kernel developers cannot decide to drop support for old architectures? What would any such requirement mean for the long term future of the Linux kernel?
- superkuh 11mo agoAnd this is why very long support windows are great. All the corporate persons and the bleeding edge devs can improve off into the sunset while a stable base for non-dev culture human people who want to get things done and have them keep being done rather than requiring remakes every $timeperiod (~3 months for rustc, ~10 years for c++xx culture target changes, etc) exists.
- cookiengineer 11mo agoThis is a good thing, despite my own concerns. The major argument you get from "why are you using Windows 7" is exactly this, companies in infrastructure argue that they still get a supported operating system in return (despite the facts, despite EOL, despite reality of MS not patching actually, and just disclosing new vulnerabilities). And currently there's a huge migration problem because Microsoft Windows 11 is a non-deterministic operating system, and you can't risk a core meltdown because of a popup ad in explorer.exe. I have no idea why Microsoft is sleeping at the wheel so much, literally every big industry customer I've been at in Europe tells me the exact same thing, and almost all of them were Windows customers, and are now migrating to Debian because of those reasons. (I'm proponent of Linux, but if I were a proponent of Windows I'd ask myself wtf Microsoft is doing for the last 10 years since Windows 7)
- tonyhart7 11mo agobecause Windows LTSC is still good
- keyringlight 11mo agoIt's good while the software you run on it still supports that OS, for example the big one would be anything build upon Chromium (or electron) framework which deprecated win7 support when Microsoft ended ESU support (EOL +3 years).
- jl6 11mo agoNice, that means the latest Ubuntu LTS release (24.04) can be supported beyond the date of the Year 2038 Problem. Although theoretically now solved using 64-bit time_t, I wonder how robustly it’s been tested in real world deployments.
- perlgeek 11mo agoJust this year I ran into the year 2038 limit in MariaDB where converting between Unix timestamps and ISO dates (don't remember the direction). By the time this happened, a new version was already out that had that limit lifted, but the version I ran still had it. Cannot have been more than two years old. On the plus side, businesses and administrations work with dates in the future a lot (think contract life times, leases, maintenance schedules etc.), so hopefully that flushes out many of the bugs ahead of time.
- wkat4242 11mo agoI wonder how much this legacy addon costs. Is it available to consumers?
- jwr 11mo agoLTS releases are great. I only use LTS releases on my servers. Problem is, if you need PCI compliance (credit card industry requirements, largely making no sense), some credit card processors will tell you to work with companies like SecureMetrics, who "audit" systems. SecureMetrics will scan your system, find an "old" ssh version and flag you for non-compliance, even though your ssh was actually patched through LTS maintenance. You will then need to address all the vulnerabilities they think you have and provide "proof" that you are running a patched version (I've been asked for screenshots…).
- stingraycharles 11mo agoThat’s normal in any compliance process, and why you typically want to vet the vendor that does the compliance monitoring. And auditor (some auditors are really overzealous). Took us a while to find the right ones.
- jwr 11mo agoIf you use Braintree as your payment processor (something I would not recommend), you get SecureMetrics as your PCI auditor. Even worse, someone is overzealous, because you will get SecureMetrics on your back even if you are below the PCI thresholds.
- thewisenerd 11mo ago_if_ you're using ubuntu, there's the CVE tracker you can use to ~argue~ establish that the versions you're using either aren't affected or, have been patched. https://ubuntu.com/security/cves https://ubuntu.com/security/cves https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2023-28531 https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2023-28531
- thewisenerd 11mo agothat said, we've also had the same auditor ask us to remove the openssh version upon telnet (which by RFC 4253, is not possible) so ymmv
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- blfr 11mo agoVery cool but how useful is that for anyone beside the handful clients who wrote the checks here? I tried using Ubuntu 20.04 with the Pro support (you get a couple machines for free) and it worked but nothing else did. Even Firefox gave me trouble. (To be fair to Cannonical, the upgrade from 20.04 to 24.04 through 22.04 went decently well. Despite some UEFI register running out of memory and the installation being interrupted, it resumed every time to complete upgrade. Three servers and a laptop came back up with full functionality. Even Unity seems to work.)
- perlgeek 11mo agoOf course it mostly helps those who pay for it. But the availability of 15 years LTS is also a good argument for Linux in some corporate decision making.
- superkuh 11mo agoIt wouldn't work with modern Ubuntu releases. They're all container based and Canonical has no control over Firefox and many other packages on those platforms. They've given up and that's upstream's job. So there would be extreme friction on modern Ubuntu container based releases over 15 years. But not for 14.04. 14.04 was released before all this container nonsense and it is a coherent userspace canonical packages. I can tell you from person experience the last decade (using the free version) that it's worked flawlessly.
- JackSlateur 11mo agoThe LTS, long support version and stuff are all confessions of a technical and organisational failures If you are not able to upgrade your stuff every 2 to 3 years, then you will not be able to upgrade your stuff after 5, 10 or 15 years. After so long time, that untouched pill of cruft will be considered as legacy, built by people gone long ago. It will be a massive project, an entire rebuild/refactor/migration of whatever you have. "If you do not know how to do planned maintenance, then you will learn with incidents"
- cyanydeez 11mo agoSure. But infrastructure will always be seen as a one time cost because enshittifiction ensures every company with merit transitions from merit leaders to MBA leaders. This happens so often its basically a failure of capitalism.
- wiseowise 11mo agoWhy do you need to “upgrade your stuff” every 2-3 years?
- JackSlateur 11mo agoWhy do you need to clean your house every week/couple of weeks ? Why not clean only once a year ? Keeping your infrastructure/code somehow uptodate ensures: - each time you have to upgrade, this is not a big deal - you have less breaking changes at each iteration, thus less work to do - when you must upgrade for some reasons, the step is, again, not so big - you are sure you own the infrastructure. That current people owns it (versus people who left the company 8 years ago) - you benefits from innovation (yes, there is) and/or performance improvements (yes, there is) Keeping your stuff rotting in a dark room brings nothing good
- exe34 11mo agoIt didn't need to be this way. It's a choice made by companies who stand to gain from the continuous churn.
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- darkwater 11mo agoOn the one hand we have now Ubuntu LTS with 15 support and on the other hand we have Kubernetes and distributions like EKS churning out 3 releases per year with a 18 months long life adding absolutely nothing really needed. Will this madness ever stop?
- mariuz 11mo agoFor Debian there is Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) : a commercial offering to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases to 10 years (i.e. 5 supplementary years after the 5 years offered by the LTS project) https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended
- drchaim 11mo agoAfter almost 10 years using ubuntu for vps servers, I’m tired of update them every two years. I would prefer a rolling release distribution, but i don’t have time to select one and make the switch :/
- daveguy 11mo agoIsn't it worth the balance between stability and effort to go with LTS (long term support / security updates only)? You know the updates on LTS will be relatively much safer. The limit of potential breaking updates to every 2 years is mostly the point. But if you're just talking about a home lab where you want to use the latest advances without the latest exploits, try a dependency cooldown. Simon Willison recently pointed out this post by William Woodruff about dependency cooldowns [0]. Wait a day between update release and adoption to identify supply chain compromises. In other words: Don't move fast. Don't break things. Or: Move slow. Keep things. [0] https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using-dependency-cooldowns https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using...