afaik. You still get free updates. But with pro you get 5 more years of updates on lts. making it a total of 10 years.
Which seems completely fair. This is a silly article and too many comments here aren’t understanding this.
If a business wants 10 years of support then yeah they should pay as it’s cheaper than upgrading.
For personal use just goddamn update after 5 years geeze lol.
Edit: this person’s blog post just misunderstands the situation. See here for actual release info and when ESM starts for each release. 5 years standard as of 24.04.
And you can get the extra 5 years for free anyway with a free subscription for up to 5 machines.
Did they misinterpret the VM limitation, or does the personal license not cover VMs?
Is this news? The article is from Apr 2023
I only received the prompt to subscribe today.
Not surprising, they want some of that RHEL money. When you choose a Corporate distribution, enshittification is usually what you get…
You’ll get 5 free instances if you get a subscription, but that kind of messes with the whole “just install Ubuntu from a USB key and use it with no hassle” workflow many Ubuntu users used to love.
It only matters if you want support after 5 years. Just upgrade to a new release if you don’t need 10 years. If that’s a hassle, get the free subscription for 5 machines and you get 10 years.
Seems reasonable!
I subscribed to pro with a throwaway email so I’m okay with it generally speaking.
But 5 instances is not enough, not even for home personal use. If you’re running VMs for other tasks, you quickly hit this limit.
- Ubuntu desktop
- kubuntu VM for yarr
- xubuntu VM for testing questionable programs
- Ubuntu on raspberry pi
- Ubuntu in AWS
I donate to Ubuntu annually but I’m at the point of foregoing that donation if I need to subscribe to their subscription model.
Then update after 5 years 🤷🏻♂️
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Because you want to use LTS for ten years instead of five?
I just realized that I’m getting advertisement for Ubuntu Pro where it said it will give me more security patches when I use apt update. I’m using PopOs. Which really irritated me.
Report that to PopOs. I doubt they would want this ad to appear to their users. They will probably remove it.
Man I’m kinda glad I moved on from Ubuntu. I used to like it, but my interest fell a while back and I can’t even really explain why.
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That’s bullshit, it’s still free for the normal lts support. Only if you want support after that you’ll have to pay, or upgrade to the next version for free.
Any sysadmins here to suggest an alternative server distro? We’ve been installing Ubuntu in most of our VMs at our company, and while I realize it’s a hassle to switch them all, I kinda want to at least have a discussion about it.
ditch ubuntu and switch to debian :)
We’ve had Debian on some machines, and while it’s stable, packages tend to be too old for some operations. Maybe Sid…
…there is backporting or containers. Or arch btw :D
Since you(r team) already have the Ubuntu experience, the obvious and senseful migration path is Debian. Stable plus docker/podman covers for most of what’s needed plus cover for the “bUt thIS paCKaGe iS 2 weEkS olD!!!1” crew.
Fedora is the only other “server distro” that I know of but obviously you can install any distro and just omit the desktop environment from the install.
Debian
I use Debian for my own server for over 3 years now and it’s been great so far.
Learning nix might be worth it on a server.
Horrendous how canonical engineers with bills to pay might want to monetise their labour!
More seriously, open source should not be confused with free labour. Do you think Linus works on the kernel for free? He does not, nor should he. We are all lucky to benefit from 5 years free updates from Ubuntu. You need longer, because your use case is so mission critical? then pay for the engineer’s time.
Edit: grammar
