Terrible news. This will hold back progress like usual. We need shorter release cycles with less risky upgrade paths, not this nonsense.
Save the new operating systems for new hardware, bus standards, innovative GUIs, etc... Let me just keep pounding away 12-hours/day without a hiccup on my current gear.
So either your applications and browsers come from the distro's package repo, in which case when their upstreams update to newer versions that require newer dependencies your distro doesn't have, your distro will be stuck on older versions lacking the innovation you seek.
Or you use flatpaks or snaps, which don't have that problem because the flatpak / snap bundles the newer libraries, but then the stability of the OS doesn't help you. And you're still stuck with an old flatpak / snap daemon that could cause problems with new flatpaks / snaps, and with an old kernel that could be missing syscalls that the newer libc's inside the flatpaks / snaps require. Eg I remember discovering that 16.04 and earlier don't have the getrandom syscall, which made it impossible to run a newer OS's Docker container since its libc expected it.
To be clear, I'm all for people wanting to remain on supported OSes for a decade. I'm just pointing out that expecting "innovation" is incompatible with that.
No, it's not. There's a huge difference between "let me update these 2 apps which I care about" and having to upgrade the whole system to get those 2 new updated apps.
At home - I'm a MacOS user, and work very hard not to upgrade the to a new OS in the first month it's released, and am quite comfortable upgrading to a new laptop every 4-5 year.
So, I like new things for my personal environment. It's just my work environment that I want to stay the same for as long as possible.
If I'm building something new, I generally want a new kernel/OS underneath. Especially if what I'm building can take advantage of it (improvements to filesystems, networking stack etc..).
After I've launched my service, I want stability over everything else. So here, I'd launch on the newest Ubuntu available, and stick with it for quite a long time.
Huh? That's weird, Linux, OSX and Windows kernels have been battle-tested and hardened for like 30 years or so now. I can't imagine what kind of application would need a different kernel to start with.
Aside from security concerns (which you didn't mention, plus one could argue an LTS is safer), could you give a specific example of:
>what I'm building can take advantage of it (improvements to filesystems, networking stack etc..)
The whole statement seems to nake that premise clear :^)
Is it really worth it to jump into a completely new feature to get marginal improvements on the most basic stuff (io, networking, etc...), all of this, in exchange of working with unstable APIs and unproven security vectors?
My answer is no but I can picture people who would say yes. I guess it's a matter of personal preference (plus I work on stuff that has to be reliable, above everything else).
Either you speak for yourself or you have no clue how a market works.
Long term support i know to be paid for by enterprise: hence there IS demand.
Why do "we" need shorter release cycles?