Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Business demand & positioning

  • Many assume this was driven by one or a few very large customers with delayed replacement projects who needed a couple more years on aging fleets.
  • Commenters see 15‑year LTS as a powerful confidence signal, especially after trust was damaged by CentOS changes.
  • Extended support is framed as increasingly common in B2B software, aligning with long-lived enterprise systems where 15 years is “not that long.”

Cost, availability, and who benefits

  • Ubuntu Pro’s existing extended support is free for a small number of personal machines, but it’s unclear if the new “Legacy add‑on” is also free for individuals.
  • Some note that home/IoT users would benefit conceptually, but likely won’t pay subscription prices that exceed device cost.
  • Long support is also seen as a selling point in compliance‑heavy environments; however, auditors often flag “old” versions even when vendor‑patched, creating friction and extra proof work.

Maintenance realities & security

  • Debate over whether maintaining such old releases is “a world of hurt” or a meaningful, even enjoyable niche job (backporting fixes, retrocomputing vibes).
  • Practitioners describe difficult cases: no reproducers, no clean vulnerability‑to‑commit mapping, old code diverged from upstream.
  • Concern that obscure packages on a 15‑year LTS might see very little scrutiny, but others counter that low deployment also lowers attacker interest.
  • Speculation that Canonical may lean on automation/AI, and that many vulnerabilities won’t trigger fixes if no CVEs are filed.

Stability vs churn

  • Strong split: some argue that needing 10–15‑year LTS is an organizational failure and that regular 2–3‑year upgrades keep systems healthy.
  • Others, especially with enterprise/manufacturing experience, argue upgrades are risky, costly, and often bring no business value; what they want is “same behavior + security fixes.”
  • Long LTS is praised for industrial, regulated, or legacy‑hardware scenarios where OS change is harder than keeping old software alive.

Comparisons & ecosystem notes

  • Comparisons to RHEL (up to ~13 years with add‑ons) and Debian’s ELTS (10 years) suggest Canonical is leapfrogging competitors on headline support length.
  • Some note that modern Ubuntu’s containerized app model (e.g., Firefox as snap) complicates very long support; the 14.04 era is seen as simpler for coherent, distro‑managed userspace.