On 1/21/21 5:50 PM, Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
Debian has an average of two years[*] per support. Oracle has ten like upstream RHEL. Choice is pretty clear to me. [*] one year after subsequent release, so an average of one to three years depending on installation date
So, I want to address the "ten years of support" albatross. On the surface, ten years of support sounds like a big win; it certainly did to me back when it was first introduced. I have found that the reality is far more nuanced than that. I have found in my own career that the "ten years of support" argument has made me lazy in keeping up with newer technologies and methodologies, stagnant in my own server and workstation deployments, and increasingly frustrated once the five-to-seven year point has passed in what I can't do or can't build because "ten years support! Stability! Stability! Stability at all costs!"
For my uses and purposes, Fedora's six month cycle is too fast (I've been on that roller coaster before, no desire to go back to it). CentOS Stream's continuous release cycle is too fast, especially in the kernel ABI department. I believe that, for my uses at least, a two-to-five year cycle is going to be the sweet spot. And the fact of the matter is that CentOS and the ten-year cycle isn't nearly as stable as you might first think; install CentOS 7.0 on a test VM and carefully compare to 7.9, especially on the workstation side with Firefox and Thunderbird!
Further, when it's budget time, updating stagnating services running on a stagnant OS becomes an easy mark for cutting from the budget, because "ten years!" - until those ten years are over and you find out that you've just delayed all the effort into one lump instead of spreading it out a little bit each year or two (or three to five).
But ten-year stagn^H^H^H^Hupport also makes me less marketable if I were to need to change jobs, especially if that ten-year stability has calloused my learning skills to the point that I feel personally threatened by major changes to, say, the init system underneath everything.
So, in my career, I'm not sure relying on ten-year support has been a good thing. YMMV as I'm sure there are places where ten years of support really is critical; just not for me.
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