It only matters if you want support after 5 years. Just upgrade to a new release if you donāt need 10 years. If thatās a hassle, get the free subscription for 5 machines and you get 10 years.
Which seems completely fair. This is a silly article and too many comments here arenāt understanding this.
If a business wants 10 years of support then yeah they should pay as itās cheaper than upgrading.
For personal use just goddamn update after 5 years geeze lol.
Edit: this personās 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.
Also keeps your base system clean if you uninstall (big reason why docker is so popular on servers). Can create custom environments for a project then just delete everything when youāre done.
Also very useful on immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue (all my command line programs and some gui programs are in a distrobox container, exported to the host so they are just there like normal).
The Distrobox assemble command allows you to install programs from a file and automatically export (unfortunately thereās some bugs I hope are fixed soon). So things can be declarative like nixos.
Learning nix might be worth it on a server.