Re: [bitfolk] Ubuntu EOL dates - which to quote in general documentation?

Hi Roger, On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 07:41:27PM +0000, Roger Light wrote: Just so that people can make a good informed decision when picking which Linux distribution to order. We get customers from time to time that pick older releases and don't understand when they cease getting security support. There have also been several new signups since December that picked CentOS 8 without realising its EOL was less than a year away. Ubuntu doesn't have explicit support for Xen either as a guest or as a hypervisor (it's in the "universe" section) so BitFolk isn't in a position to *ensure* Ubuntu guests remain usable. In fact as you may have noticed Ubuntu has more than once made a decision to ship something that doesn't boot even under versions of Xen that in are in their own archive. That was unlikely to have been on purpose - I expect it just wasn't tested. e.g. the Xen hypervisor packaged by Ubuntu right now cannot boot Ubuntu 19.10 and beyond due to the LZ4 kernel compression. Older things continue to work mainly because no one wants to changes them! Going the other way, the aim would obviously be to keep being able to run Linux distributions that are still considered viable by the vendor where possible. And longer if possible. There's plenty of Debian etch still running in the BitFolk customer base. :( This is going off into the weeds somewhat - we aren't in a position to tell existing customers what they should be running, we always have to try to make it work. This is just about what guidance is published regarding end of life dates. I'm not comfortable just putting an EOL date that includes a 5 year period you have to maintain a (free for personal use on <= 3 hosts) subscription for. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting