long-term support release

And I'm Shane.

Gary, you say that you think that the LTS or the long-term support model is fundamentally unsustainable.

Would you tell us why?

Yeah.

Now, I've worked in places before where there is so much governance around testing a patch before it gets deployed to production that sometimes there is a two, three, four-week lag.

Sometimes it's even worse, right? And it's, they lag production a month behind.

Now, that gets worse when you think about the LTS model because, of course, a lot of the times, at least in the open source world, the maintainers of those LTSs are taking on the task of backporting fixes from newer versions, and therefore, that burden is only going to get greater as more and more CVEs come out that need their fixes backporting.

So I suppose it was really a twofold thing.

.NET 8 and .NET 9 both expire in November.

I've seen some questions about this, including if long-term support or LTS is still a thing, and why .NET 9 is already expiring when .NET 10 has only been out for a year.

The reality is that .NET 9 support was actually extended.

But let's talk about what LTS versus STS means, why this process is so fast, and what will be supported going forward in today's episode of DevQuestions.

Welcome to the DevQuestions podcast with Tim Corey.

software development is more than just writing code.

So let's talk about the rest of it.

Specifically, let's talk about the changes to STS and why we have two versions of .NET going out of support at the same time.

Right? And then you do it, and you spend the weekend fixing things that weren't broken.

Daniel's been running Linux desktops for almost 20 years, mostly Ubuntu, and he just moved to 26.04 LTS.

He's planning to stay on the LTS track this time, but he wants us to be honest about what that costs him.

His question is whether staying on LTS is still a meaningful technical compromise this year, or whether the mechanisms around it, the point releases and the hardware enablement stacks and the container stuff have basically closed the gap.

It's a good time to ask it because 26.04 shipped in April and the first point release landed at the end of September.

So the picture is complete now.

The hardware enablement kernel is available, and we can actually see what Canonical is doing with the maintenance model.

So the question splits into four.

I mean, there won't be if you patch, so obviously do that.

Um, and then right now this is affecting Microsoft 365 apps for Enterprise, Office, um, LTS, LTSC 2021 and 2024.

And this was reported anonymously, so dang, not even taking credit for your CVE.

Um, good, good for them.

Next, we select the model that we want to.

Usually, what you want to do is select the latest LTS model.

LTS means that it's a stable release, not one of the newer, more experimental releases.

So here we're gonna go with twenty-four O four LTS.

At the time of recording right now, that's the latest one.

Click Confirm.

You can also use it as a desktop very similar to Windows, and basically you want the latest release.

That's probably gonna be towards the top.

First, which labs actually fit which philosophy? Are there companies deliberately favoring fewer, more substantial releases, and others chasing rapid iteration? And can we tell the difference from their release histories rather than their marketing? And is there any actual evidence that a slower cadence correlates with better testing, reliability, or quality? Second, he wants us to zoom out, because this tension predates generative AI by decades.

Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS, Arch, the whole rolling release argument.

He wants to know whether releasing less frequently is a mark of engineering maturity or a romantic reading of what might just be slower development.

It's a good instinct, and I think the data is going to complicate it in a way he won't expect.

Frozen, tested, stable, and if you need something newer, you wait or you don't run Debian.

Ubuntu sits in between, and the two-tier structure is the interesting part.

LTS releases come every two years in April of even years with five years of standard support, 10 with Ubuntu Pro.

The interim releases, the ones between the LTS, get nine months of support.

mean, but you would have thought that like.

LTS, Kubuntu would be not that much different.

Really? Do you know what I mean? I mean, it's not like I've added loads of programs.

Even she's added loads of programs.

Okay, maybe you're right.

Maybe the secret sauce that Mint puts in is the je ne sais quoi that makes everything work.

I think it speaks to the amount of effort that the Mint team put in because you can – yeah, okay, it's based on LTS Ubuntu.

Yeah, but then you run into these weird – situations where you have completely different uh the system will respond completely different uh talking about mint versus uh ubuntu to a piece of hardware you know and and there's no logical reason why it should work on mint and not on ubuntu which mint is based on but yet there it is you know