[llm_trw]

Debian was always there, they deserve what they get.

I'm saying this as someone who fought tooth and nail to migrate to Debian instead of Scientific in 2010 because you can't ever trust a for profit company.

But that was too hard, and what would a grad student know about the real world anyway, so here we are.

[vetinari]

Debian has relatively short support.

Centos 7 was released in 2014 and the support ends next week.

Debian 10 was released in 2019 and the support also ends next week.

[llm_trw]

>Debian has relatively short support.

Then make it longer. The debian team is starved for volunteers and would love to have more long term maintainers.

[szundi]

What an inside out reasoning

[kwertzzz]

So we want:

1. free/gratis Linux distribution

2. long support (~ 10 years)

3. not needing to contribute (as a community)

It seems that we can only pick two from this list (even a distribution with short support cycle needs community).

[g15jv2dp]

Sorry but that's an asinine reply. The people looking for the support are busy doing something and looking to pay a company for the support. If they had the time to volunteer for support, they wouldn't be looking for support themselves. You're the one touting Debian out of nowhere, you can't ask the people you're talking to, to volunteer to make your point better.

[llm_trw]

The people wanting to pay for support can absolutely move to rhel with no pain what so ever.

[bayindirh]

There's Freexian (as in company) if you want: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended

[rahen]

How good are Freexian / Debian ELTS compared to RHEL for their 10 years support and security fixes? Are they cost effective?

https://www.freexian.com/lts/extended/docs/cost-estimation/

[dralley]

>The people looking for the support are busy doing something and looking to pay a company for the support

I mean, if they are using CentOS, apparently not.

[freedomben]

"what would a grad student know about the real world" is seeming like fair analysis given this.

[llm_trw]

Universities aren't the real world and I was right about redhat.

[bayindirh]

However, you can release-upgrade a Debian installation in five minutes or less, without any big issues cropping up.

Also, you can re-install a cattle worker node in 10 minutes or less, from power on.

[eraser215]

What breaking changes do those upgrades introduce? Is there any compatibility guide?

[bayindirh]

Debian handles all of these transitions by itself during upgrade process, and shows you a nice readme before starting all of them.

For example, Debian has finished two big transitions recently. Merging /usr and 64 bit time support. Both are done on testing, and even on testing nothing has broken.

Another big change (which also made HN front page via LWN) was /tmp behavior change. It's handled differently. If your system is already installed, it doesn't change the behavior, but new systems will behave differently.

All of these changes are again communicated via "NEWS" mechanism. If Debian changes a config file, it's replaced. If you modified this file, apt will ask what you prefer, and you can diff the file in place.

In the past, many similar changes are made, and all were transparent. If you're not using any external repositories which change tons of system packages with their own versions, nothing changes during upgrades for you.

While there's an extensive release note provided with every release like [0], the upgrades are pretty straightforward.

As a result, having a few or many Debian systems which are older than a decade is a norm, not an exception.

[0]: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/

[edward28]

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ This has sections for how to upgrade from the previous version and what major changes/issues.

[bayindirh]

I daily drive Debian close to 20 years. We'd prefer to have Debian on board, too.

However this is where we're now and what we have to go through.

> they deserve what they get.

Why the anger though?