[blfr]

Very cool but how useful is that for anyone beside the handful clients who wrote the checks here? I tried using Ubuntu 20.04 with the Pro support (you get a couple machines for free) and it worked but nothing else did. Even Firefox gave me trouble.

(To be fair to Cannonical, the upgrade from 20.04 to 24.04 through 22.04 went decently well. Despite some UEFI register running out of memory and the installation being interrupted, it resumed every time to complete upgrade. Three servers and a laptop came back up with full functionality. Even Unity seems to work.)

[perlgeek]

Of course it mostly helps those who pay for it.

But the availability of 15 years LTS is also a good argument for Linux in some corporate decision making.

[superkuh]

It wouldn't work with modern Ubuntu releases. They're all container based and Canonical has no control over Firefox and many other packages on those platforms. They've given up and that's upstream's job. So there would be extreme friction on modern Ubuntu container based releases over 15 years.

But not for 14.04. 14.04 was released before all this container nonsense and it is a coherent userspace canonical packages. I can tell you from person experience the last decade (using the free version) that it's worked flawlessly.