Seeking an extended-support O/S similar to FreeBSD

[Michael Wayne]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 07:31:50PM -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
> 
> Every other minor release of FreeBSD is supported for 2 full years, with no
> new features added, just security fixes (aka Extended Releases).
> 
> And every major release of FreeBSD is supported for at least 4, somtimes 5,
> years.

That's exactly the issue.  After 4-5 years, there's nothing.

> RedHat isn't much better. Sure, they'll support the core OS for 5 years,
> but you can't install new, up-to-date software on it unless you upgrade the
> entire OS (been down that road too many times to ever want to try again).
> We gave up on RedHat after fighting with 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x.

Thanks. I appreciate the feedback.

> FreeBSD isn't perfect (what OS is?), but it's amazing that you can install
> the newest versions of MySQL, Firefox, KDE, Postfix, etc on 7.4 (until the
> end of Feb, anyway), or 8.3, or 9.0, or 9.1. And can continue to get
> security fixes for all those releases (except 7.x now).

That's no help at all to a bunch of machines that started life on
4.1 back in 2000 and will continue to run another 10-15 years, is
it?  What's your suggestion for dealing with that? It's not like
anything currently supported is gonna fit on those machines without
a rediculous amount of effort.

> What's missing from FreeBSD support?

Having one release supported for an extended time. It would be
insane to consider maintaining every release for an extended period
but ONE release, supported for an extended period (decades) would
really help.  We're far enough down the security path that there
are not that many security vulnerabilities in base. Ports generally
build just fine on older versions.