There's no OS in the world which has both of "requires no maintenance" and "receives all upgrades forever".
Have you ever tried to install the latest Node.js and discovered your glibc.so is too old? It's a major impediment and just plain sucks, especially for open source.
Apt-get dist upgrade is really not hard. Learn it, do it.
Society & world has a necessity to not anchor itself to a distant past. In general I believe free software is moving at a bit more incremental pace, with some noticeable new innovation sprinkled in. But a 4.15 kernel from 2018 really is from a before time, before things started settling down. I have no respect for preserving those systems. Anchoring ourselves to the past is antithetical to open source's strengths.
I moved from Debian to Arch for my main home server because I was fed up with reinstalling between versions. Now I think you can upgrade in place.
I will be back to Debian at some point because Arch requires me to remember to update. It works great but since I have everything on docker it depends not make much sense to be bleeding edge
When did Debian require a reinstall between versions? I've been upgrading in place since around 1996. In those early years, sometimes upgrades had rough spots but that hasn't been the case for at least a couple decades.
I came back to Debian when it was 7 or 8 and installed it 6 months before the next release.
The upgrade notes made it very clear that in place upgrades are an abomination and that I will burn in hell if I do that. Or something like that.
So I reinstalled.
And took a Leo of faith in the next version by using "stable" as the distribution, apt dist-upgrade and all. It worked !
Maybe the alarming messages are now gone, good thing. I will be switching from arch to debian soon and stay there for ever.
It's 2024; 18.04 was over 6 years ago.
How often do you rebuild your bare metal garage snowflakes?
18.06 was 5 years 11 months 11 days. A: it makes no sense to count from when you personally installed it vs when it was released. B: it was in any case so close to 6 we may as well say it was 6 years C: if you don't mind running 6 year old software just run old jellyfin too.
You have to be conscious when you set it up, and I diligently keep notes of what I did.
I do enjoy my Arch desktop but it's a labor of love.
I've been upgrading the same Ubuntu server across LTS releases since 14.04 - now on 22.04 - without any major issues. Spending 30 minutes every two years to upgrade major versions isn't that big of a lift.
It sounds like maybe you've had issues but the process does typically work.
As someone who is running Jellyfin 10.9.0 on Ubuntu 18.04 via docker, yes, it really has.
The non-support only matters for directly installing the Debian packages. Docker continues to work just fine.
> Ubuntu users: We have dropped support for non-LTS Ubuntu releases with 10.9.0. That is, we have not built 10.9.0 packages for any releases except 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS, and 24.04 LTS, and we will not publish builds for any new non-LTS releases going forward.
You know that stupidly nice Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box you painstakingly setup just four years ago right before the pandemic that you can't trust to auto-upgrade? Go fuck yourself.
I'm done with Shibuntu, now Debian only with no regrets or downsides so far.
Downvotes welcome, but p.s. I love you <3.
Wasn't docker supposed to make OS release irrelevant?
Sigh, I love you all.