Debian Installer's 9.0 Stretch RC2 Released

[Vistaus]

If 5 years is too short, then why not put RHEL on those servers? RHEL has longer support. But I do think 5 years is plenty for most home servers and small to medium businesses.

[Vistaus]

Dude, go work for some big company, say a bank. Nothing there gets upgraded ever. Try to make some purely technical improvement and get shot down 70% of the time because they'd rather have you making business changes that bring in money. And purely technical improvements have a risk of breaking stuff- so they're mostly seen as risk with little to no benefit.

Look at RHEL support. RHEL5 was released in 2007. Red Hat will provide support until 2020. We're still running that bloody thing over here, and I have no idea whether it will get upgraded or when...

https://access.redhat.com/support/po...fe_Cycle_Dates

I agree with you, although I'm pretty sure that companies that never upgrade anything will not use some community-maintained distro like Debian even if support was 10+ years. They'll go for Enterprise-supported distros, like RHEL (which you mentioned).

[dungeon]

Something came to my mind, If these banks that never upgrade nothing then they don't upgrade hardware also so has 32bit or low mem machines... we have Debian 9 working fine on these

[ldo17]

Debian is a great distro for production servers. The only down side is LTS version last only 5 years, which is a little bit short for those really "production" servers.

Why, does it stop working after 5 years?

[dungeon]

Why, does it stop working after 5 years?

It just stops being supported with updates and security fixes after 5 years.

Of course for those who wanna continue to use it after these 5 years (which is not recommended of course) archive is always there, just change a repo line after that and continue to run it forever if you want

https://www.debian.org/distrib/archive

Same like Microsoft dropped Window XP support in 2014. but people still use it today... in similar way somebody could still use Debian 2 which is released back in 1998. No one recommending doing this, but no one stops you .

[ldo17]

It just stops being supported with updates and security fixes after 5 years.

But if the company subscribes to the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it mentality, what difference will that make?

[dungeon]

But if the company subscribes to the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it mentality, what difference will that make?

Nothing, if you are sure you will not be affected with securty issues (if machine is not connected to internet, nor any other network so no one but you really has any access to it) even i can recommend this Every update is recommended but optional. Whatever, It will not stop working if you don't wanna break it.

Even current releases you can run without updates or security fixes if you don't wanna them, just disable these repos and never update - that is it .

[dungeon]

And now we have what everybody talked/waited... Debian Stretch is in real Freeze

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/02/msg00001.html

[dbpalan]

If 5 years is too short, then why not put RHEL on those servers? RHEL has longer support. But I do think 5 years is plenty for most home servers and small to medium businesses.

Coz Debian is my preference. I have a Centos server which is so stable yet get years of support without worrying. I can make my life happier with that.

The license agreement and security tracking standard of Debian passed the troublesome issues and security auditor requirements, while the last obstacle is its short lifetime that I cannot persuade others to use it instead of the ... costly RHEL.