[andix]

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release.

ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

[interroboink]

I feel there is a balance to be struck between a project that is popular (where if you run into problems, you will get good support), and one that technically gives longer-term support (but if things go wrong, that support might not be very good).

I haven't used a lot of different distros, but for me, Debian has been a good balance of those factors. You may need to do more upgrades per decade, but the ones that you do are more liable to go smoothly.

Just my 2¢ on the topic (:

[andix]

Alma/rocky give you 10 years. Ubuntu pro, rhel and suse too, but they are commercial options (some free offers exist).

So while debian is a great distribution, with 5y is definitively not in the top 5 of LTS distributions.

[unethical_ban]

I don't work on a server team, but in network/network security. My company made an announcement that they are extending our product's software lifetime to four years: 3 years standard support + 1 year high sev patches.

It seems to me in the 2020s that 5-7 years is plenty of support for a single OS release, and that OS support teams should be nimble enough to roll out new instances and migrate data at that cadence.

[andix]

Did you read the blog post? Not upgrading a server for 10 years does happen. And it's fine if you get the right distribution with security updates.

[WJW]

So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude.

Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just admit you don't care about it enough anymore to do even that. In the last case just delete the project.

[cocoto]

It can be way more than 2 hours depending on the project.

[andix]

Yes, I'm lazy. And that's fine.

[com2kid]

> So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude.

I want the machine that serves my static blog pages to have, ideally, 0 maintenance.

It needs to do one thing, serve some static HTTP pages and have new pages pushed to it.

Quite frankly I wish some of those "minimal docker first OSs" had taken off.

[MrDOS]

If you want 0 maintenance, then you don't want to run your own infrastructure. Go give NearlyFreeSpeech or some other shared host a few cents every month and you'll be much happier.

[com2kid]

Hilariously I pay less for a vultr box than what nearlyfreespeech charges.

Vultr is really damn cheap.