Ubuntu has been going closed source for a while now. When it started using its own app store. I stopped recommending it as an option.

 

Yeah, the writing has been on the wall for a while. I need to find a new distro at this point, pretty tired of what they're doing.
And then I need to rebuild all of my virtual servers, as they're all super stripped down ubuntu "minimal" servers.

 

Isn't Ubuntu Pro for Cloud based services and enterprise? It's basically extended support for LTS versions. There is a free version of Ubuntu Pro too, which is the same but for a small number of machines. I get it that some regular users prefer LTS releases, but those still get their 6 year life cycle.

 

I am cautious about the way they are implementing it, but they're really not doing anything that Red Hat, SuSE and Oracle aren't doing and haven't done for years. Right now they're actually more generous than those three, but time will tell whether it stays that way.

However, you are (whether deliberately or not) misrepresenting it as "you don't get security updates if you don't have Pro!".

This is untrue.

You get five years of support.

You get extended support after five years by paying for Pro.

Since it costs time and money to keep employees maintaining old releases (backporting bugfixes is not always an easy task) it does not seem entirely unreasonable, although it depends on pricing.

You can also get phone support if you need it. Maintaining that isn't free either, and I would hope their phone support are people who are at least fractionally competent with using Linux - if it's just more "read off a script and pass the buck" "tech support" then it's worse than useless of course.

Companies who feel they need more than five years of support are likely to be able to pay for it. Out of curiosity, I checked - for a single desktop without phone support it's $25 a year ($150 with phone support). For a server with unlimited VMs, it's $500 a year with "full-fat Pro" (the main-only support is $225).

For a home user, I don't see the point in paying for more than five years of support. However, if you're a home user and desperately need to not run "sudo apt dist-upgrade" after a full backup you can currently run five machines for free, so a "normal" person doesn't have to pay for it anyway... at least for right now. Time, again, will see if that changes longer term.

I don't use Ubuntu (although I do use an Ubuntu-based distro, Linux Mint, for my desktops) I run either Debian or Arch at work. Arch is used because we have some really new hardware that neither Debian nor RHEL support well, and also I dislike RHEL intensely due to past experiences with quad-socket G34 servers.

What distros offer ten years of support for free, by default, that aren't just clones of RHEL? Not Debian, because that's three years. Arch is rolling release so can't be measured on the same metric.

Bear in mind that with this extended support, you could still be running Ubuntu 14.04!

 

Also to note is a full Pro sub includes updates for the Universe repository for the 10 year period. That is not included even in the standard updates. So you do get something quite useful. All the more useful if you want to avoid dist-upgrading more often than absolutely necessary. If you stay off pro (or free) then you don't lose anything. It's the same as it's always been.