this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
80 points (89.2% liked)
Technology
59694 readers
4988 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And you can install those distros on a Chromebook, no? You can probably use CloudReady after ChromeOS no longer supports it after 10 years.
Debian LTS for stable releases is 5 years
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
Ubuntu LTS is 5 years
https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
Fedora is 13 months
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/
LTS just means staying on the same release and guaranteed support for that time which is important for businesses. As a consumer you can always just do a release upgrade.
Since most businesses rely on Windows anyway, that's pretty much irrelevant for this discussion. They cannot use Chromebooks either.
The original assertion was that a Chromebook becomes useless ewaste when the software updates stop. But as of today Chromeos gets software updates for longer than any Linux distro major release (10 years ChromeOS vs 5 years for Linux). You can install Linux on that Chromebook after Google stops supporting it just the same as the Windows laptop after Dell stops supporting it. And there's CloudReady and Chromium. Theyre not ewaste without Google updates, you have options.
Linux receives updates forever. The point of LTS kernels is not to stay on them forever but to have to do less testing. It's not very likely that upgrading kernels will break something but it can happen so businesses can stay on LTS kernels and continue to get critical security fixes and they'll only have to update and test once a new LTS kernel comes out. The average person should use the regular kernel and that's also the default on pretty much all distros
Comparing ChromeOS updates to LTS kernel updates makes no sense, especially since the LTS kernel can just be updated to a newer version if that specific version doesn't get updated anymore.
But contrary to Linux or even Windows (unless they pull some hardware requirement shit again) you need to switch to another OS and not simply do a release upgrade.
You aren't understanding.
That's support for one specific software release.
It'd be like saying Apple supports iPhones for 1 year not 5+ years, because they're only on iOS version X for one year.
Linux devices get updates literally forever.