- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- technews@radiation.party
The reality is that reliable backports of security fixes is expensive (partly because backports are hard in general). The older a distribution version is, generally the more work is required. To generalize somewhat, this work does not get done for free; someone has to pay for it.
People using Linux distributions have for years been in the fortunate position that companies with money were willing to fund a lot of painstaking work and then make the result available for free. One of the artifacts of this was free distributions with long support periods. My view is that this supply of corporate money is in the process of drying up, and with it will go that free long term support. This won’t be a pleasant process.
Like everything, it’s a trade off. Windows allows different versions of the same libraries, but at the cost of an ever growing WinSXS folder and slow updates