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by xenophonf 6 hours ago
> quite annoying

It's also quite stable, which you'd think more people would prize given the recent and on-going supply chain attacks.
2 comments
thewebguyd 6 hours ago
Stable as in unchanging, sure.

Stable can also mean "you get to keep all the bugs present in this version for the next 4+ years"

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jandrese 5 hours ago
Or worse, the kernel moves beyond the package in the repo so a year and a half later it doesn't even work anymore.

VirtualBox is really bad about this.

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happyopossum 6 hours ago
Given the recent dramatic uptick in vulnerability discoveries, it's also prone to being quite insecure...
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xmprt 6 hours ago
LTS still typically get security updates. That's what the support in long term support means.
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moskimus 5 hours ago
This gets thrown around a lot, but it's not entirely true. Depending on the particular distro, only certain core packages are likely to get updates on LTS releases. Non-core packages may just get left to rot until the next LTS release. Specifically Ubuntu follows this. A lot of their non-core packages just get imported from Debian and then just sit unmaintained until next release (this goes doubly if not using Ubuntu Pro).
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Milpotel 2 hours ago
> Depending on the particular distro, only certain core packages are likely to get updates on LTS releases.

All LTS distros fix only some core packages sporadically as no one is able to back port all the patches esp. since most packages do not use CVEs and just fix bugs on the go. "Stable" for non-rolling distributions simply means "horribly broken and outdated".

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thewebguyd 4 hours ago
Especially frightening when you look at how much everyday stuff is actually in the Universe repo in Ubuntu. Without Ubuntu Pro, your LTS system can sit in a very insecure state for a long time as patching Universe is "best effort" from the community.

Most popular GUI stuff is from universe, as are quite a few dev tools. Some examples: Gimp, Inkscape, pip (and a ton of python packages), most of gnome, a big chunk of KDE, htop, mariadb, etc.

See for yourself grep -h "^Package:" /var/lib/apt/lists/_universe__Packages | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u

Or to see only what you have installed from Universe: comm -12 <(dpkg-query -f '${Package}\n' -W | sort) <(grep -h "^Package:" /var/lib/apt/lists/_universe__Packages | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u)

A big repo isn't always better.

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