Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 Each Get a Decade of Support from Canonical (betanews.com) 32
Canonical has announced that it is extending the life of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 to a decade. BetaNews: In other words, Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 are getting longer Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) periods as Canonical pushes back their End of Life (EoL) dates. The former will now get security updates until 2024, while the latter will receive them until 2026. "This lifecycle extension enables organizations to balance their infrastructure upgrade costs, by giving them additional time to implement their upgrade plan. The prolonged Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS enables a secure and low-maintenance infrastructure with security updates and kernel livepatches provided by Canonical. The announcement represents a significant opportunity for the organizations currently implementing their transition to new applications and technologies," says Canonical.
Re:Um, they already went EOL (Score:5, Informative)
"Extended Security Maintenance" is paid access to a private archive containing patches for the kernel and "the most essential user space packages". That's what's being extended.
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Have you even tried to migrate servers from 16.04 to 18.04? Or 14.04 to 16.04?
I did. First I cloned the server, then ran the migration from the old version from the old to the new version on the clone. While the migration of the operating system itself worked, packages that were installed & configured on the old, completely disappeared after migration.
So I ended up rebuilding servers instead, Not everyone gets the time to do so. There will be some that can't and the rest is not inclined to do so.
While I
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I could do the upgrade and then spend the next few weeks reinstalling apps, packages and the like, but what a pain.
Good news for me.
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Good news for me. (Score:4, Interesting)
Still rocking xubuntu 16.04 on my daily driver. It works fine and I'm sick of upgrading and then dealing with all the breakage. This news should mean that the repos will keep working.
Re: Good news for me. (Score:2)
You do realize that retail and OEM versions of Windows 7 can be upgraded to Windows 10 or Windows 11 if the hardware will support it for free,which by my math is far cheaper than $25/month.
But the better comparison is someone running Windows 10, which was released in 2015, neatly between Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, and enjoys free support from Microsoft until October, 2025.
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You do realize that you can do the same for Ubuntu, right?
There are sometimes reasons why you simply can't upgrade. And with Windows, I seriously question the "up" here.
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You do realize that retail and OEM versions of Windows 7 can be upgraded to Windows 10 or Windows 11 if the hardware will support it for free,which by my math is far cheaper than $25/month.
But the better comparison is someone running Windows 10, which was released in 2015, neatly between Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, and enjoys free support from Microsoft until October, 2025.
Who cares? Windows 7 was just tolerable, Windows 10 sucks, and it looks like Windows 11 will just suck harder.
Maybe Microsoft offer free "upgrades" because no one in their right mind would pay for their crap?
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The kernel patches should fall under the GPL and be freely redistributable, unless Canonical wants to violate the GPL. I'm curious what they want to do against that.
Semi-OT:
Personally, I refuse to downgrade from Windows 7. That means my upgrade (very slowly migrating) is to Xubuntu Linux, with Windows 7 still hanging around for gaming via dual boot.
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They're not doing anything against that. ESM packages are simply from a separate, paid for, repository. They're not even stopping you from doing "apt download xxx" on a subscribed machine and installing it elsewhere. It simply becomes hassle free when you have a subscription. Regarding kernel patches, the advantage of Ubuntu Advantage is that you don't need to reboot. It's live patching. Similar (or same?) as what Oracle offers for their Unbreakable Linux.
Good news. (Score:2)
Thanks Canonical.
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It's good mostly I think for containers. It was a bit abrupt when CentOS 6 vanished suddenly last December, requiring some scrambling.
Some of the problem is that it's not a part of most developer's paid jobs to keep everything up to date with the latest OS and compilers. It's often put off as long as possible, and then just when an important customer release is due then something goes wrong. So you have production releases based upon something ancient; outdated GLIBC or GCC. No one worries about it becau
Great response to CentOS's demise (Score:5, Interesting)
Canonical stands a chance at unseating Red Hat's server dominance with this move. The cost of Ubuntu Advantage [ubuntu.com] (the paid service that provides Extended Security Maintenance for years 5-10) is vastly cheaper per year, and (if I'm reading this right) you get the first five years for free (for updates, not support). A lot of corporations used CentOS for its long support cycle, knowing there was a migration path to RHEL in the event there was a need to stick with an older release. If Ubuntu provides similar support at that level, it stands to take the lead as the premier Linux distribution for servers and enterprise desktops.
As to noncommercial use, Ubuntu is already way ahead. This is an older style of metric, but DistroWatch [distrowatch.com] currently ranks Ubuntu as the 6th most popular distribution (Debian is 7th) while Fedora is 10th, CentOS is 26th, Rocky (the CentOS fork by the CentOS founder) is 35th, and Red Hat is 61st. (Those use a 6mo data span, but the rankings are consistent across the last 12mo as well. The "trending past 3 months" shows Ubuntu as rising third-fastest, behind EndeavorOS and SparkyLinux.)
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OK. That seems fair.
Ubuntu Server sounds appealing to me. We'll soon have to migrate a large and currently non-containerized workload off of CentOS, and this is one of the things I hope to seriously evaluate as its replacement.
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Debian doesn't have scheduled releases and doesn't support their releases for long enough for very mature production deployments. I personally prefer Ubuntu LTS for servers for this reason. I also prefer Ubuntu LTS for my non-production servers because it's one less thing for me to worry about; there's an upgrade available every two years, but I've got considerable time to procrastinate (and skipping an LTS isn't so bad).
For my desktops and laptops, I prefer Debian Testing as a ~rolling release (noting th
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If you were using CentOS 8, the migration path to Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux is as easy as updating your yum repo configuration and running an update.
It's certainly easier than switching over to Ubuntu, anyway. Because their packaging system is different, that distribution shift would require rewriting your installation and deployment scripts at a minimum.
That's because backporting ... (Score:2)
... security fixes is trivial in Linux. Because Linus does not break userspace and because FOSS.
This is why I (and other FOSS proponents) gape with awe and amazement at the bullshit the poor bastards that are my MS and Windows colleagues still have to go through in 2021 and why I never for the life of me will build anything mission critical on proprietary crap.
Re: Because Linus does not break userspace (Score:2)
That's not true. Whatever kernel ships with Ubuntu 20.04 breaks userspace...badly. If you use the sticky bit on a directory and put a file in that directory with 0666, you should expect to be able to write to that file as any user. Works as expected on earlier kernels. Does not work on 20.04 without modifying a specific kernel parameter to revert to the previous (and correct) behavior. I can't remember which one it was off the top of my head. And getting modified parameters to actually stay put is a n
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Long lived operating systems? (Score:3)
I think 10 years is a nice long time to support an OS:
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: April 2014 - April 2024
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS: April 2016 - April 2026
But the industry standard is more than 10 years, sometimes slightly more sometimes around 12 years:
Windows 10: July 29, 2015 - October 14, 2025
Windows 8: October 26, 2012 - July 11, 2023
Windows 7: October 22, 2009 - January 14, 2020
Windows Vista: January 30, 2007 - April 11, 2017
Windows XP: October 25, 2001 - April 8, 2014
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Somethings missing in your assessment.
If you purchased a machine in mid January 2007, for example you would have had a mere 7 years support. The support windows are more like 7 years minimum compared to 8 for ubuntu. So it really depends. It's pretty comparable either way.
In other words taking ages to release the next OS version isn't a virtue.
But let's now go shit on Apple. Not only are their support windows smaller but they have planned obsolescence so you cannot even put a newer OS version on after a po
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But let's now go shit on Apple. Not only are their support windows smaller but they have planned obsolescence so you cannot even put a newer OS version on after a point rendering the hardware junk.
Mod parent up and award a chocolate bar.
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But let's now go shit on Apple. Not only are their support windows smaller but they have planned obsolescence so you cannot even put a newer OS version on after a point rendering the hardware junk.
I mean, Microsoft has done much the same thing with Windows 11.
My processor isn't compatible. Yes it's from 2014 but an i5-4590 is still faster than many of the newer still supported CPU's. And now really isn't the time to be shopping for upgrades, so my gaming machine will just stick with Windows 10 for now.
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I'm not really the type to defend Apple super hard, which puts me in a weird spot, but I think it depends on your definition of "support", which you don't use consistently. Based just on release date, let's look at a bit:
High Sierra was released in late 2017 and supported machines as old as 2009 with a midrange of 2010. So that's about 7-8 years.
Mojave was released in late 2018 and supported machines as old as 2012 in the mainstream. A few older ones with newer graphics cards. So that's a bit of a cutoff th
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So I don't think it's remotely fair to say that Apple has shorter windows when they're roughly comparable,
Thing is though, I'm typing this from a perfectly functional Thinkpad W510. This is not a new machine, what with being 11 years old and all. Having debated with Apple users in the past, I know that the Apple contemporaries of this machine are essentially bricks as far as Apple care, with the most recently supported OS being now well out of security updates.
The first OS this machine ran was Ubuntu 8.04,
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to claim Apple's support is super long/longer than Windows or Linux or great or anything, just that I don't think it's unreasonably short either. And their policies aren't really any different than any other vendors, especially if we take hardware support/repairs into account.
Love me an old Thinkpad - I still regularly use a Core 2 Duo Z61t dual-booting Windows 10 and Kubuntu latest fully supported and it's fantastic for the age, among a couple newer ones.
I guess if we're