[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.