An overview of support options, which are mainly free:
If you need live human support for a consumer desktop system, you can purchase it on a yearly basis:
If you need live human support for a consumer desktop system, you can purchase it on a yearly basis:
Everyone seems to be getting greedy for updated hardware and operating systems. I don't really care to upgrade my hardware every two years. If Ubuntu cannot deliver without fastest processor and video memory, than they might as well just start selling to corporate and be done with the free stuff.
There are also slimmed down Ubuntu versions for older hardware, e.g. Xubuntu and Lubuntu. Those run much faster on aging systems, allowing Ubuntu to support people with newer hardware.
Not to mention that nobody's forcing you to update if you don't want to. For example, 8.04 is still officially supported through April 2011 for desktops and 2013 for servers. Please feel free to continue using that if it works better for you.