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On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions (utcc.utoronto.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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The reality is that reliable backports of security fixes is expensive (partly because backports are hard in general). The older a distribution version is, generally the more work is required. To generalize somewhat, this work does not get done for free; someone has to pay for it.

People using Linux distributions have for years been in the fortunate position that companies with money were willing to fund a lot of painstaking work and then make the result available for free. One of the artifacts of this was free distributions with long support periods. My view is that this supply of corporate money is in the process of drying up, and with it will go that free long term support. This won't be a pleasant process.

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[-] nottelling@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago

I could be wrong, but isn't the entire debian stable tree maintained for years via open source contributions? Sure the redhat downstreams might be on their own, but there's plenty of non-commercial distros that keep up to date.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 19 points 1 year ago

According to Debian Releases

Debian announces its new stable release on a regular basis. Users can expect 3 years of full support for each release and 2 years of extra LTS support.

So about 5 years, though it is not clear how well this works in practice (how much is actually updated and how well supported).

From the Debian Wiki - LTS:

Companies using Debian who benefit from this project are encouraged to either help directly or contribute financially. The number of properly supported packages depends directly on the level of support that the LTS team receives.

I think this is sort of what the article is pointing towards... long-term support really depends on commercial support, as volunteers are more likely to work on the current or more recent thing than go back and backport or update older things. If corporate funding dries up (which it appears to be doing), then while volunteers will still contribute some to long-term linux distributions, it won't be at the same level it currently is with commercial support.

[-] Auli@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Yes but the real issue is the downstream have had it pretty easy and now have to do more work.

this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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