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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.