Mark Shuttleworth Reveals Ubuntu 18.04 Will Get a 10-Year Support Lifespan (zdnet.com)

At the OpenStack Summit in Berlin last week, Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a keynote that Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) support lifespan would be extended from five years to 10 years. "I'm delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years," said Shuttleworth, "In part because of the very long time horizons in some of industries like financial services and telecommunications but also from IoT where manufacturing lines for example are being deployed that will be in production for at least a decade." ZDNet reports: Ubuntu 18.04 released in April 2018. While the Ubuntu desktop gets most of the ink, most of Canonical's dollars comes from server and cloud customers. It's for these corporate users Canonical first extended Ubuntu 12.04 security support, then Ubuntu 14.04's support, and now, preemptively, Ubuntu 18.04. In an interview after the keynote, Shuttleworth said Ubuntu 16.04, which is scheduled to reach its end of life in April 2021, will also be given a longer support life span.

When it comes to OpenStack, Shuttleworth promised again to support versions of OpenStack dating back to 2014's IceHouse. Shuttleworth said, "What matters isn't day two, what matters is day 1,500." He also doubled-down on Canonical's promise to easily enable OpenStack customers to migrate from one version of OpenStack to another. Generally speaking, upgrading from one version of OpenStack is like a root canal: Long and painful but necessary. With Canonical OpenStack, you can step up all the way from the oldest supported version to the newest one with no more than a second of downtime.

Comments

Why not let the actual users decide how long?

[shanen]

This should be a feel-good story, but... I already upgraded one of my Ubuntu machines past 18.04 and I'm mostly annoyed.

Here's a crazy idea: Why not ASK THE USERS how much support they are actually willing to pay for? As long as there are enough users who are willing to chip in to keep a particular version alive, then it can stay alive. When there are too few users, then it just has to die.

My vision of the "chip in" is on the order of 10 bucks, which isn't much, but you would get to multiply by the number of users. Some users might chip in more, but I think the basic "chip" should be small. Better to call each chip a "charity share", and the wannabe users would buy charity shares in the projects required to keep the software running.

For example, there would be an annual project for kernel support, and as long as there are enough donors paying to support the kernel, then it would be supported. For something so essential, you would want to fund the next year in advance, so as the end of the year approached, you would start encouraging the users to pledge charity shares for next year's support. If too few people are willing to support the required kernel, then you still have various options, but basically you start putting on the pressure to pledge or switch to another kernel or even another distro that still has enough support going.

But won't the free riders be a big problem? No. As long as the actual costs are covered, then who cares how many free riders there are? The whole point is to divide things into reasonable projects to make sure all of the costs are covered. I admit I'd recommend ignoring the free riders when it comes to making decisions, but it should always be open for the free riders to chip in and become financial contributors, eh?

Anyway, time's up for now, but the "charity share brokerage" bids you ADSAuPR, atAJG.

Re:Why not let the actual users decide how long?

[shanen]

Where is this "free world" of which you speak? Mostly it makes me think you're one of those Libertarians with a totally distorted understanding of reality. Having a theoretical freedom to do something is NOT the same as having any meaningful capability to do that thing. However the real problem with the real world in contrast to the Libertarian fantasy world is that the information is never equally or fairly shared. It's like the delusion that stock prices reflect perfect information of the real value rather than the programmed delusion of some fast computers that some other fast computer will pay a higher price in the future.

My take is that we need different economic models. For example, I think we should have a pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation system as part of the general solution to the monopoly problem. The tax rate on corporate profits should be progressive, but not in absolute terms, but rather based on market share. Excessive domination of a market is reducing freedom, and the company should extra for attacking freedom. It should actually be better for the shareholders to divide the company into two competing companies that would offer more choice and more freedom while paying lower tax rates on their profits.

The main problem is with natural monopolies. In that case the high taxes should mostly be used for (1) regulating the company with the monopoly and (2) researching ways to break the monopoly. You know the monopolist can't be trusted for (1) and is not motivated to do (2) (or even worse, if the monopolist succeeds in (2) the company may sit on it (as in the case of FM radio)).

I'm pretty sure I have at least a dozen more crazy ideas, but time's up for now, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.

Better than for Windows now

[Lonewolf666]

At first glance, Canonical is only matching the 10 years Microsoft used to promise for Windows, counting extended support. But if you look closer, Microsoft already is weaseling out of some edge cases (the latest Intel CPUs and AMD's Ryzen on Win7).

So I'd bet on Ubuntu 18.04 being a safer option than Windows 10 for a system you want to keep for a long time. Let alone that Ubuntu 18:04 was released almost three years after Windows 10. So even if both companies keep their 10 year promises, Ubuntu 18:04 is the better long term option from today's perspective :)

Market it to people on Windows 7

[xack]

As an alternative to he madness of Windows as a Servce. Improve virtualization/Wine and give people an exit fom reboot hell.

Re: Free or paid?

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

You used to be able to buy extended access to repo for $250. Then they stopped responding and blocked me from the repo. This is AFTER they had promised the service would be available to buy for 4 years at least.

After continuously trying to contact them I found out they now have a minimum spend, and if you are below it they don't want to know about you. and don't even bother responding to you. There sales team is on a commission where only the new volume deal count for anything.

Ubuntu eventually updated there website to reflect this, but like 8 months after they just snubbed everyone.

So if you had a small number of servers you had literally zero notice, just one day you are not gets any security patches and you have no option but to upgrade instantly. Now what you thought you had years to do you must do on a Sunday before your get hacked by latest CVE, or pull yourself off the internet.

Mean while red hat will happily sell you 1 server for $349 per year and give your years of notice before they pull the plug on anything.

Even if you are happy to pay for 5 years extra, I wouldn't trust them to even deliver on it.

Home of the once-a-year 24 hour fiasco

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a few days ago I was loading Python packages on my 10 old (but fairly fast due to a SSD) desktop for a development project. I accepted an upgrade message suggesting I move from Ubuntu 18.04 to 18.04.1. The computer has old built in graphics and the upgrade dragged in a package called ubuntu-desktop that dragged in something that completely broke my graphical desktop. It turned out the computer was running Linux just fine and I could ssh into it and get a shell prompt. All I needed at that time was information about how to roll the suite of desktop packages back to what I had previously.

I have been running Linux for at least 20 years and my observation is about once a year Ubuntu gets broken due to some simple little change that sometimes can't even be tested for. What is missing is documentation and support organized in a usable manner. The AskUbuntu system is not a success. The documentation does not explain simple stuff like rolling back a bad software package. Most Linux computer screwups are easily repairable and the so-called fresh install is a big mistake.

  So on the ten year support proposal, my comment is the support staff should improve the troubleshooting and testing process. I have at least eight years of a filesystem that has not been trashed, but I have wasted between 2 days and 3 weeks every year due to both un-detectable hardware problems (like a USB chip coming un-soldered) and the Ubuntu install program that maroons your old /home in some dog gone un-mounted partition.