[kwlug-disc] Ubuntu LTS future

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

In another thread, Paul said:

On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 8:51 PM Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc <
kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> wrote:

> Clearly LTS is losing, which means a lot more cognitive burdens for
> sysadmins -- but at the same time Salt (and many other projects) that
> use the rolling release "move fast and break things" approach depend
> upon a stable Ubuntu onto which they can build THEIR software. They
> just don't want the people USING Salt to have the same experience.
> There is some kind of disconnect here.
>
> In this case the situation is worse. Ubuntu included the
> salt-master in its LTS release. Ubuntu 18.04 is still supported. But
> the LTS release promise is now broken, because if somebody installs
> Salt from the Ubuntu repos they will get software with a level 10 CVE.
>
> Unfortunately, I think this means I ought to track upstream and use
> their repos, which is another administrative headache I wanted to
> avoid. It also means that I would now need to upgrade all my minions to
> track the latest release, and who knows what that will break.
>

Paul,

I am in complete agreement with you here. I don't use Salt, but I know
that I want to stay with LTS releases, feeling secure. This depends on
repository governance and stewardship by those who maintain the
packages and the distro's security team.

Lately, there have been cases where the ball was dropped (Salt is such
a case).

More worrying is that going forward, Canonical is forging ahead with snap.
Snap freezes the dependencies of an app at a certain point. Moreover, it
requires a cluttered file system, with each app having its own /snap/xxx
file system mounted!

On a new 20.04 LTS server install, I am getting these snap apps by default:

/dev/loop0       72M   72M     0 100% /snap/lxd/15682
/dev/loop3       97M   97M     0 100% /snap/core/9436
/dev/loop1       72M   72M     0 100% /snap/lxd/15766

And Canonical will be releasing Chrome/Chromium as a snap package,
encapsulated withing a .deb. This means Canonical is acting as an
intermediary
unnecessarily.

Mint decided that enough is enough, and will not support snap anymore.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/

All this makes me wonder whether Ubuntu should still be the favoured distro
with LTS and rich maintained repos. Should I go with Debian stable and be
done with it?
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