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A comment on What's new in the .NET 11 runtime. Parent comment

Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime by kbolino on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:24PM (#50443356)
This whole thread is a bit of a tangent, but I'm not sure the STS/LTS distinction makes much sense for the end user. STS gets a relatively generous 2 years of support while LTS gets a relatively anemic 3 years of support. Plus, with yearly releases, every LTS expires at the exact same time as its successor STS. Are STS releases generally less stable or more experimental than LTS releases? Otherwise, this feels like a valueless distinction.
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Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime by whaleofatw2022 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @12:34PM (#50443463)
Yes, STS releases tend to be more experimental and the LTS shores up the gaps.
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Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime by jongalloway2 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @06:54PM (#50448000)
That may have been true in the past, but that is not the stated policy: "The quality of all releases is the same. The only difference is the length of support."

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/d...

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Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime by ThunderSizzle on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:32AM (#50450036)
Well, yes, that's the official narrative, but if you seen .net 5, .net 7, and .net 9, and .net 11 and compare them to the LTS that came after them, it's easy to see that pattern.

.net 5 brought records,and then .net 6 brought record structs.

.net 9 previewed the field keyword, and .net 10 released it.

.net 5 brought primary constructors for records, then .net 8 expanded that to classes.

There's a few opposite examples too, but it's a trend I felt over the past decade.

My only wish is they just jumped C# and .NET versions to the year number, since they are incrementing annually anyway, and aren't do semver anymore.

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Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime by hvb2 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @04:16PM (#50446405)
Supporting anything for 8 years is a huge commitment. That means 8 concurrent versions needing at least some work all the time.

I think Microsoft regretted those long (10 years) support guarantees they had for .net framework. In the end, it probably slows you down in terms of innovating

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Re:What's new in the .NET 11 runtime by kbolino on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @05:34PM (#50447263)
Given .NET's annual release cadence, 7-8 years of LTS would mean 5 concurrent versions: 1 STS release and 4 LTS releases. This is still a lot of old versions to keep updating, of course.

Anyway, the critique was less about the exact length of LTS, and more about the lack of significant difference between LTS and STS, i.e. why should I choose LTS in the first place. With STS, you have 2 years of support, and 1 year to upgrade. With LTS, you have 3 years of support, and 1 year to upgrade.

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