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VSCode Drops Ubuntu 18.04 Support

48 points| pschastain | 2 years ago |omgubuntu.co.uk

22 comments

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justin_oaks|2 years ago

Ubuntu 18.04 is EOL, unless you pay for extended support. How many people are paying for that support?

I hope the people complaining about the VSCode incompatibility aren't people running EOL software and complaining that other people aren't keeping their software compatible with it.

I upgraded a number of servers to Ubuntu 20.04 because Ubuntu 18.04 was EOL. I also upgraded my desktop to Debian 12. ;-)

TillE|2 years ago

Yeah I'm a big fan of aggressively dropping support for obsolete platforms unless someone is paying you a lot of money to do otherwise. Don't run software that isn't getting security patches.

daveoc64|2 years ago

> Ubuntu 18.04 is EOL, unless you pay for extended support. How many people are paying for that support?

The extended support is free for consumers.

wkat4242|2 years ago

Can't you just keep using the old version? It's pretty much feature complete after all

Edit: yes the article mentions it so it's not nearly as bad as suggested IMO. If you're on an os from 2018 you're clearly not really dependent on the latest versions of everything.

In the mean time you could start working on the OS upgrade.

I don't really understand the wish for old versions in the Linux world. I use BSD myself which doesn't have this coupling.. You can be on a stable OS but have rolling cutting-edge packages. Pretty ideal for me.

cypress66|2 years ago

> If you're on an os from 2018 you're clearly not really dependent on the latest versions of everything.

I'm on Windows 10 which is from 2015. I want the latest software, but an older more stable OS (not Windows 11 yet).

It's true that Windows 10 has had big updates (builds). But maybe that's the right approach?

inferiorhuman|2 years ago

To be fair, Microsoft doesn't support VSCode on BSD anything (and likely never will).

kaelinl|2 years ago

This messed with me too. At work our primary development environment is a farm of older CentOS machines. They all lost support with this vscode upgrade. It probably impacts hundreds of people. I had to send out instructions to downgrade and pin your vscode version while we look for a workaround.

I get that it isn't entirely within the vscode team's control (Electron chose to make the switch), but even then, it really interferes with a lot of people's daily development needs. These systems aren't particularly old or out of support.

funkychicken|2 years ago

I just helped a coworker get his remote vscode working on RHEL7. If you compile glibc from source and install it in some local directory, you can run patchelf —set-interpreter —set-path on ~/.vscode-server/bin/*/node and write to a special “skip requirements file”

touch /tmp/vscode-skip-server-requirements-check

patchelf --set-interpreter /opt/glibc/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --set-rpath /opt/glibc/lib:/opt/glibc/lib64 ~/.vscode-server/bin/*/node Warning: you’ll need gmake and all the gnu tools for building, make sure to ../configure with —disable-werror

dmm|2 years ago

> while we look for a workaround.

emacs will always be there for you, when you're ready.

Twirrim|2 years ago

> These systems aren't particularly old or out of support.

CentOS 7 goes EOL June 30th, so you're pretty close to their end of life (CentOS 8 stream has 2.28, so should still work with the new vscode version, which is why I'm guessing you're talking about 7.)

If you don't already have plans for replacement/upgrading, you really need to have plans.

mikeravkine|2 years ago

Ubuntu 18 went EOL on May 31, 2023 so about 8 months ago. What CentOS are you running that's still in support and was affected by this change? I had to upgrade all my systems last year after the EOL as most python packages dropped 3.8 support.

asdaq1312512|2 years ago

Just to double-check - does this mean Ubuntu 18.04 cannot be a VSCode remote target anymore?

> VS Code 1.86 (aka the ‘January 2024’ update) saw Microsoft bump the minimum build requirements for the text editor’s popular remote dev tools to ≥glibc 2.28 — but Ubuntu 18.04 LTS uses glibc 2.27, ergo they no longer work.

pythonaut_16|2 years ago

Wouldn't this just mean if you're on Ubuntu 18.04 you'd need to manually update glibc to >= 2.28?

18.04 is an LTS release which according to Ubuntu's website ended standard support in April 2023 and still has "Expanded Security Maintenance" until April 2028.

From the article it seems like the real problem is Microsoft didn't adequately communicate the change in advance or provide safety checks when upgrading. It seems like an easy oversight to make though.

Also I'm sympathetic to the numerous situations in which developers have no ability to upgrade old Linux boxes but it seems like Microsoft's not entirely to blame for not supporting a 6 year old Ubuntu release a year after its standard support timeframe.

TL;DR: Situation sucks, seems like a typical Linux dependency issue, hopefully they consider and communicate better in the future.

ekimehtor|2 years ago

Is it not possible to just update glibc ?

https://sourceware.org/glibc/sources.html

PlutoIsAPlanet|2 years ago

Not on the system as you'll likely break ABI compatibility and need to recompile everything that uses glibc (basically everything), and LTS distros (e.g. CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu LTS) guarantee binary compatibility during the release so this isn't feasible.