I’ve been seeding many Foss things for years but for some reason, people keep downloading Ubuntu versions that are more than 3 years old.

Any ideas why there is always someone downloading the ancient stuff, especially Ubuntu?

  • clif@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I just want to say that you’re a MVP for seeding that much for that long. Lots of TBs up there - you’ve helped out a ton of people.

    Thank you.

  • neanderthal@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yes, Ubuntu 20 isn’t EOL yet. A lot of those downloads are probably IT staff or developers that are running Ubuntu servers or developing on those versions.

    ETA: We still have some RHEL 7 and clones at my day job

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    20.04 and 22.04 were LTS versions, aka, long term support.

    Any application that requires stability should run on LTS versions. Combined with Ubuntu being one of the most popular distros, makes 20.04 and 22.04 the most popular choices for anything in a home lab and many smaller business needs.

    Whether you’re building a server for home DNS, or a time server for a small business, then you’re probably using Ubuntu as the base.

    I think the next LTS version will be 24.04, so things might shift sometime after that.

    • pietervdvn@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Correct. Naming of ubuntu is always . of release. The LTS’es are supported for four years, so when 24.04 is released, the 20.04 will be EOL

  • rhythmisaprancer@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know about now, but my first Linux OS was Ubuntu and I appreciated the long support because of this. That was in the dial up days, tho, I can’t imagine why anyone would require that now ☠️

  • Diva (she/her)@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I worked at a place which was still using a 20.04 version (for products they were selling) because updating it would require spending any amount of time updating software. Path of least resistance is using the old os forever.

    • pbjamm@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      10 years ago I was working at a place that still used an Apple ][e

      It controlled a ROM burner that was vital to the manufacturing process. In a back room was a stack of backup ][e s just in case the production one should ever fail. In the years I worked there it never did.

  • MechKit@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I assume it’s not human driven. Maybe some automated archiver? Some bot looking for proof of pirated content, and just downloads everything it finds?

    • ejmin@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Right, that sounds like a good guess. That makes sense, bots are everywhere.

      • GroteStreet 🦘@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Some of it may be, but the fact that the LTS versions (20.04 & 22.04) are downloaded overwhelmingly more than the others seem to indicate it’s more intentional.

        • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Do old versions of Linux (Ubuntu in this instance) run better on really old hardware? That might be a reason if so.

  • Nightwatch Admin@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    Systemd haters? But seriously, this could well be because of business environments where applications require specific OS versions to keep being supported by the vendor. Or better: where the orchestration tool cannot be updated because of the old OSs while said OSs cannot be updated because it will break orchestration.

    This is why people love containers: you can run insecure software on insecure OS (component)s while pretending to be in control on your shiny Kubernetes cluster.

  • ms264556@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I occasionally have to download and run old versions in a VM to build poorly supported software.

    E.g. step 1 of the build instructions here

    Install the following packages in an ubuntu - 14.04.6 LTS machine