[balou23]

Debian LTS only has 5 years of support, without guarantees, on a volunteer basis.

RHEL has 10 years of support, with the option of 13 years.

I like debian, but sometimes you have to have long term support. And I fully understand why you wouldn't support 13 year old software without getting paid for it.

[brnt]

> Debian LTS only has 5 years of support, without guarantees, on a volunteer basis.

Seems like there's plenty of volunteering in the CentOS fork community. Why not put that wood behind Debian LTS arrow? Seems like a much better idea than continue trying to build on an unreliable partner like Red Hat.

[aeyes]

But the work is mostly to repackage RHEL patches. To support Debian LTS for longer you have to do all the backports which is obviously much more work.

[briffle]

Seems like a great time for Debian to step up, and offer 'sponsored' 10 year LTS support for their releases..

[indymike]

> RHEL has 10 years of support, with the option of 13 years.

The problem here is that the people who need 13 years of support are perfectly OK with paying Red Hat for that. No one is saying that doesn't have great value if you need it... problem is you don't need it for an awful lot use cases.

[fragmede]

Red Hat didn't get to a billion dollar business on the back of not "needing it for an awful lot of use cases". We may not see it since we're developers reading HN, where it's all about the latest tech stack, but those 13 years if support are a huge money maker for Red Hat. They'd do 15 and 20 if their engineers wouldn't revolt. Outside of sexy tech is companies that want really really really stable, don't ever want to upgrade, and can afford to pay not to, until the very end. Hence that whole Y2K rush to update software.

There's a ton of Python 2 code still out there that won't get updated to 3 if it can be helped.

It doesn't look big, but it's like an iceberg. 9/10ths of it is invisible, and just sits there, raking in money.

[Twirrim]

> Debian LTS only has 5 years of support, without guarantees, on a volunteer basis.

Less than that if you care about security patches. Debian's Security team stop after ~18-24 months, at which point it transitions off to, quote, "Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian Security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.".

[creatonez]

In practice I don't think this is a huge problem. It seems the Debian LTS team only gives up on maintaining packages once it becomes nearly completely impractical to do so.

For example, here are the unsupported packages in Debian 10. These are the sorts of packages that don't get included with RHEL or SLES in the first place. https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-security-support/-/bl...

[red-iron-pine]

and RHEL has paid, by-the-vendors-themselves support options.

unless you're going to have an entire org full of Linux SMEs -- and most businesses aren't going to do that, they're not software companies -- then you need a support option.

Debian ain't got that, and Canonical is something of a basketcase.