
Come on!
"Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 40, EndeavourOS, and TrueNAS 24.04 all arrive at once."
It looks like the "International English" filter has missed something.
Surely under the new El Reg style code it should be EndeavorOS
Last week was a busy one for the open source community: EndeavourOS and TrueNAS Scale arrived on Tuesday, Fedora landed on Wednesday, and Ubuntu on Thursday. This past week has seen a whole rash of new distribution releases, but there is considerable overlap between them. All of them include the latest Linux kernel 6.8, they …
Yes, I know.
It was a tongue in cheek thought that popped into my head and it's not the first time that the British spelling of Endeavour has been used.
The last shuttle brought into service, Endeavour, was named after after Captain Cook's ship which took him on his first voyage of discovery.
Yes, it is a complex thing to summarise in a few words.
If I have read the linked page correctly: people installing Ubuntu 24.04 (not the various 'flavours' of desktop) now can upgrade to another LTS release in two years, or they can stick with 24.04 and enjoy Standard Support for as long as 5 years (main and restricted repositories only) and then upgrade to another release, or they can stick with 24.04 and take out an Ubuntu Pro subscription (free for individual use on up to 5 machines) and have a further 5 years of support but limited to security updates.
Icon: we like options
I only just, after inexcusably dragging my heels, kicked out all Redhat based distros from my life and machines, and moved to 22.04, servers and desktops.
As I'm still somewhat new to Ubuntu/Debian: how smooth are upgrades across major releases generally? Whatever else, it was always a breeze on RH.
The in-place OS upgrades are generally robust; it's the third-party and universe packages you have to be careful about.
The 5-year support timescale means you can skip alternate LTS releases and just do a pair of back-to-back upgrades every 4 years, as long as you're not trying to run software in the mean time that needs new shiny things underneath. But a clean installation from scratch once in a while is always a good idea with any system.
RH upgrades? As far as I remember, it was impossible to upgrade in-place from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7 (or was it 5 to 6?)
I upgraded two DNS servers from 18.04 through 20.04 to 22.04 a couple of weeks ago & four desktop machines from 16.04 in the last couple of months.
As long as key packages aren't dropped between releases, on the servers, the biggest headache for me was maintainers changes to config files location or contents (thanks Zabbix), though that mostly related to changes we'd made to make the software operate as we wanted & either not using ../conf.d/ or it not being an option.
On the desktop machines Nvidia's curtailing of driver support for older cards was the biggest issue. One machine was reinstalled from scratch another had the proprietary drivers removed. After that I gave up on trying to fix the resolution for a bit, following a couple of dist-upgrade cycles it seemed to get bored and reverted to the native resolution of the TV.
Having spent years using both - it's MUCH easier on Debian/Ubuntu, modulo the third party stuff - however the upgrade helpfully disables all foreign repos before proceeding so it's usually a matter of finding if the 3rd party stuff is actually required anymore and then reenabling the repo as needed