[salamander014]

Generally speaking I agree we need to force the rest of the industry into a more ephemeral mindset for infrastructure.

BUT this looks like it is only for ESM, which you need an Ubuntu Advantage subscription for.

If that's the case, then this makes sense. Let Canonical make some more money off those who are willing to pay, big enterprises are slow to do anything.

[bluGill]

My company still has machines we made in 1950 that customers use in their business. They buy replacement parts from us. While we would love if each of those customers spent half a million dollars every few years to replace those old machines, we can't force them to do that. We can make some money from replacement parts though, so long as we are willing to set out sights low enough. Things that old are mostly mechanical so it is easy for someone to learn how to support them, and it saves the customers a lot of money. In the end we are proud that things we made 70 years ago are still being used in the real world for their original purpose.

You should learn the same: take pride in the fact that things you wrote years ago are still useful. Part of that means write good code so that it is easy to fix any newly discovered hack, without having to update everything else to the latest.

[salamander014]

Using physical hardware for as long as possible is absolutely the right mindset. For cost, reliability, environmental reasons, and many more.

This post was about an operating system (Software).

People shouldn't be using code that is no longer supported (support it yourself or don't use it, it's dangerous).

And people should be rebuilding their infrastructure from scratch as often as possible. That's the only way to prove you've built something reliable, auditable, and correct.

VMs and containers make that very easy and achievable for even the smallest of teams.

Linux goes to great lengths to support lots of different (and old) hardware. Linus has said many times, if you maintain it, it can stay.

[dnautics]

Maybe moving forward that's true as efficiency hits limits, but you really shouldn't use old hardware if the new hardware so outstrips it's efficiency that switching to the new hardware amortizes the cost of the new hardware plus the cost to decommission the old hardware

[icedchai]

In the real world you see companies running the same old unpatched distro for years. I had a contract job at a company that hadn’t updated one of its systems in over 3 years. Several systems with 1200+ day uptimes. Nobody wanted to update anything since it might break. Even a reboot was frowned upon. This was at a “real company” with 1000’s of employees and a huge IT staff. Truly sad.

[johannes1234321]

The issue with software is that software is still in its infancy and we have a hard time to build software, which is "nice" to use and will work in 10 years time. This becomes especially worse with modern stuff connected to a network, where security plays a major role. And it is bad with Web stuff, where compatibility with "advanced" features can be a problem with future clients.

[RhysU]

And yet one can find 20 year old software in many domains that just keeps plugging away. The problem isn't infancy. It's an industry that monetizes planned obsolescence and chases shiny. Many of us might as well sell bellbottoms followed by skinny jeans followed by bellbottoms.

[bluGill]

Very true. It is something we as an industry need to learn.

[klelatti]

This is very interesting - and bravo for making something that lasts so long. Can you share anything more about what those machines do and why they are so durable?

[throwawayboise]

In general most older machinery was designed to be repairable. Often using industry standard sizes for things such as motors, bearings, relays, screws, etc. As long as you can get (or make) the parts and are willing to maintain the equipment, you can keep using it.

[klelatti]

Indeed. It’s often the case too that it becomes outdated - more modern designs are more efficient etc. I’m probably more intrigued / surprised that it’s economically effective to keep a seventy year old machine working.

[bityard]

> we need to force the rest of the industry

Or we could, you know, not force anything and just work together to solve problems instead.

Different industries, environments, and individuals all have vastly different requirements and _your particular_ mindset and methods do not fit all use cases.

[salamander014]

In what use case is non-ephemeral IT infrastructure necessary?

[0xffff2]

Spacecraft come to mind. Missions take a long time to come to fruition and there are already enough variables to consider. Fixing the mission control computer configuration as far in advance as possible removes one more variable from the equation.

[salamander014]

That entire industry needs a level of reliability several orders of magnitude more than any other industry. They couldn't redeploy servers even if they wanted to. I'm by no means an expert Space Systems Engineer. But any NASA technicians reading my original comment would probably agree with me in the general case. Space stuff certainly does not fall under the general case, because it's not possible.

[0xffff2]

Hi, spacecraft flight software engineer here. If I agreed I wouldn't have commented. It's not that we need several orders of magnitude more reliability than any other industry, it's that for some reason most other industries have decided to accept several orders of magnitude less reliability than they need. The day-to-day pain of dealing with a constant barrage of bugs that never get fixed and forced updates that introduce new bugs on top of the old ones makes me consider just giving up on technology and living in a cabin in the woods semi-seriously on at least a monthly basis.

[gberger]

Embedded systems

[input_sh]

Ubuntu Advantage is also free for personal use (for a few devices), so you can take advantage of that if you're not a business and are too lazy to update every couple of years.

[superkuh]

I'm a home Ubuntu and Debian desktop user. I've been using the free Ubuntu 14.04 ESM support since LTS support dropped. I've been fairly happy with it.

Using an old distro with it's old shared libs and old compilers is definitely not for the normal home user ubuntu demographic that wants things to work easily. But for curmedgeons that hate change and can deal with editing some cmake/etc and source header lines here and there it's liberating. I'd like to use Debian more but 5 years just isn't enough.

[darkwater]

May I ask for your line of reasoning here? I always thought people don't want to update to avoid doing the extra work, but if you go down manual patching and compiling a software to make it work with an older OS version, that doesn't look like saving time, at least at first sight.

[superkuh]

I like to keep hardware systems with their contemporary software. If my compiler and libs become so old as to become annoyingly restrictive I eventually assemble a new computer with new software and add it to the mouse/keyboard sharing span. But that doesn't mean I want to get rid of the system I've built up. You can say, "Use a VM for old software" but a well broken in box makes things a lot simpler. A new computer every 5-10 years isn't that demanding. I have physical machines for the gtk1, gtk2, gtk3, and now gtk4 eras that I still use every day.

There are also cases where modern versions of software are not better. Text to speech software is really important to me and Festival TTS modern versions (1.9 vs 2.0) just don't have good sounding voices. Luckily I still have my Ubuntu 10.04 box around to do that task.

Canonical keeping the base system stable and secure so I can build my source compiled userspace sand castles on top without constant (ie, every couple years) breakage is great.

[jstsch]

Wow, I didn't know that. Also, only 75 USD per virtual server. For some reason I had a much higher number in my head. Happy to pay this (and support the Ubuntu team) to keep some old boxes up for a couple more years.

[warhorse10_9]

If you have a cluster of virtualization hosts, you can license each physical server for 225 a year. It will then cover all vms on that physical host. I went over this multiple times with Canonical reps before purchasing as it seemed too good to be true, but it is. It doesn't even matter what hypervisor you are using.

[nottorp]

Yep, I had no idea until reading this announcement that it's free for 3 machines (or 50 if you're a "community member", whatever that is). I promptly registered and added my home server.

If I had an Ubuntu desktop I'd pay for the first tier of Advantage since it's pretty cheap, but sadly their physical server pricing is too much for home use (225). Maybe they could make it 25 for the first server or two or offer a more crippled tier... dunno.

[nix23]

True, i think virtual Servers and real hardware should be the same price, since pci-passthrue, the driver problems can be "potentially" the same, with 75$ for hardware much more "hobbyist" would happily pay that.

On the other hand...Proxmox.

[bachmeier]

Wish I had known that earlier. I spent a bunch of time updating a non-critical server over the summer. I even debated shutting it down rather than updating.

[cxr]

> we need to force the rest of the industry into a more ephemeral mindset

What a despicable position. 5–10 year stability is something the tech industry should be aiming for, minimum—not trying to stamp it out as if someone who achieves it is doing something wrong.

Consider the Dell Chromebook 13 (7310; Lulu). It blew me away last summer to realize that this 2015-era notebook which could be had for $200–300 was still the best option among everything else I evaluated in 2020. Five years to make progress in hardware and yet _every_ other option promised only to be a step backwards. (A phenomenon separately documented here: <https://drewdevault.com/2020/02/18/Fucking-laptops.html>) Manufacturers of course do offer systems today are offering systems with slightly better CPUs or more RAM, but invariably they demand compromising on the ergonomics of either the Lulu's MacBook-quality touchpad, the 67Wh battery that lasts 6–10 hours, the form factor of its 13-inch matte screen and carbon fiber body, the silent fan, or on price—these are companies that expect you fork over at least $1000 more than the putative value of the one already unpacked sitting on the desk—just to have a system that is worse!

Against every signal saying that it would be a mistake, I actually swallowed my reservations about paying the price for a newer system. I was partially reassured by the support lead of one prominent Linux laptop vendor saying that they "promise" that I'd be happy with the purchase, and that it would be better than the Lulu. Sure enough, it gets here; the touchpad is dogshit, the fan is only able to modulate between "screaming loudly" and "screaming very loudly", and I'm left feeling a mixture of horrible dread/remorse while asking myself "is this a joke?" It got packed up and sent back and refunded, and I promptly turned around and spent 1/3 of the refund on a second refurbed Chromebook 13 and left the remaining 2/3 in my bank account.

Aside from the goofy Chromebook keyboard layout, the only downside to these devices? It's that, despite being on par with Purism's flagship notebook at the time (that also sold with a 50+% higher price tag in comparison to this notebook's original retail price), Lulu went largely unnoticed by the community. So newer Ubuntu releases silently broke the graphics, which means upgrading to 18.04 and 20.04 is a non-option. In the midst of this, we get unqualified opinions in the comments here that implicate people who want to stick with 16.04 (because a system that boots is better than one that doesn't) as threatening to "hold back progress" (clearly we've got different definitions of progress) and others cluelessly pontificating that upgrading is "easier and saves you money and pain in the long run" (again, somehow we have a different ideas of how to measure which numbers are bigger than others).

[pacman2]

"Dell Chromebook 13"

I think there are enough Laptops that don't suck. And Ubuntu should basically run on most laptops. Fingerprint reader? I don't care.

For the older ones, how about a DELL XPS 13? Or Thinkpad? lenovo carbon x1?

You can get a decent latop for 200-800 USD. I love the DELLS XPS 13/14. But sometimes I get greedy and wish I had 16GB instead of 8GB.

[AtlasBarfed]

RE: your laptop blog, the laptop market mirrors the problems with the modern desktop OS:

- Apple is closed source, trying to abuse its users AND developers with the pointless app store, OSX was a big improvement when released but basically doesn't evolve and breaks all your software with major releases, and seems openly hostile to open source, Java, Docker/containers. Stubbornly sticks to its UNIX variant and doesn't even offer a linux-ish compatbility layer (even worse considering the lack of native container support)

- Windows: where do I start. two desktops? Tiles is horrible. The UI actively hates its users. Security continues to be bad, although not as bad as the XP days. The only saving grace is WSL is basically evolving windows to becoming a UI for a linux core, which is the only actual glimmer of progress. I actually am cheering for Microsoft to get really big in Azure as the anti-AWS and at some point deciding to go all in with Linux and doing Windows as the UI for basically free to chase all that IAAS dollar.

- Linux: still completely fragmented. Treading water on UIs, not solving fundamental problems, still hardware support headaches. But the worst is that Linux, despite winning the IAAS OS wars, won't properly organize on the desktop front.

Here's a list of major entities whose funding of a real desktop on linux for small small fractions of their financial resources to make a secure, supported, easily upgraded/patched/rolled out OS would be in their great interest:

- Intel, AMD, NVidia: allows them to surface all their hardware innovations and features to the desktop without having to lobby/beg/pray Microsoft adds support to their OS. Instead, you make Microsoft chase/feel pressure to keep up.

- Dell/HP/Lenovo: cheaper hardware for their customers. Ability to directly update the OS with support for their specific firmwares and all its foibles. Maybe even support/push/innovate hardware rather than always following Apple?

- Nintendo and Sony (game consoles / set top boxes): They're already in millions of homes. Neither of these companies can handle a full OS, but they can piggyback on Linux.

- anyone with an IAAS cloud (except Microsoft): Why doesn't AWS want to take over the business desktop? Or oracle cloud, or Google compute, or IBM cloud? You are getting all that sweet IAAS money for servers, why not people's desktops?

- US intelligence and military: ransomware is cyber warfare enemy #1. Do you really want your defense being waiting for Microsoft to release a patch? When a huge number of people using their OS don't pay for it and won't upgrade? And for our military applications, do you want a closed source OS, or an open source one that you can audit? The US military should be throwing a billion dollars at Linux every year.

- EU... everything: Who made Linux? A goddamn European. Do you want to wrest technical software leadership from the US and Microsoft? Well, the author and many/most core committers are in the goddamn EU. It is sitting in your backyard. Now add it all the things I said about the US military: you can avoid (software) backdoors because the code is auditable. You can keep US, Russian, China intel from eating your lunch every day. The EU should be throwing a billion a year at Linux.

- China: Same thing as the EU: do you want closed source Microsoft OSs running on your machines? Do you want Google controlling the OS of all the phones your people use, or Apple? China should be throwing a billion at Linux every year too.

What should be happening is that Linux is getting 10 billion a year to improve itself: security, features, support, etc.

But... it doesn't.

I mean, there should be literally 100,000 core committers each getting funded 100k/year for their first and only job. What actually should be happening is probably 100 billion a year between concerned militaries, governments, corporations, etc, basically funding a worldwide army of a million committers.

Torvalds should be eligible for a (quite ironic given his temperment) Nobel peace prize just from what he has already done.