{Solved} More from Dedo

[Adrian]

I agree, but this bugs me a bit.

and often longer

Even that was true in the past I don't like to over-promise things.

[figueroa]

Fellow users, I suggest that we refrain from making claims about the longevity about any particular distro installation where such claims are not officially made by the developers themselves. Without sufficient disclaimers, what we write here may possibly be read by others as claims, or even promises. And that poor Debian wiki LTS page seems terribly misleading, though the FAQ is trying to convey that it's not official support. Based on past performance, a Debian stable release remains stable for about two years. Once the old Debian stable base passes into LTS support, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Enterprise-class and LTS distros get mighty stale in their waning years and that's not what most desktop users are looking for.

Debian has a good track record. MX has a good track record. We should respect the developers' desire to not over-promise.

[JayM]

I agree, but this bugs me a bit.

and often longer

Even that was true in the past I don't like to over-promise things.

OK, strike that bit.

MX is based on Debian's stable branch, which follows this LTS schedule. Additional support is provided by MX's development and packaging teams of volunteers for at least the same period of time as Debian, making MX Linux a good choice for those concerned about long-term stability and security.

[asqwerth]

@Bluesguy, Adrian who is a developer just said he does not like to over-promise and does not like the "and often longer" bit.

So that passage you quoted above cannot be said to "sound just right".

The thing is, Dedo is not a newbie. He should know the support life of a Debian Stable release. Therefore distros who use Debian stable repos should at least have security support on packages from said repos for the duration of Debian's own LTS Team's support, even if the distro's devs did nothing else.

What he has actually stated in more detail in the past** is that he is worried that promising distros run by a small team of (or single) developer(s) might just close shop and stop development on their project (happened with Mepis, crunchbang, SolusOS the original, Fuduntu, Apricity, Korora). That would leave him in the lurch and is one reason he has been using Ubuntu and CentOS for some of his production machines.

He regularly reviews Fedora and OpenSUSE as well and I suspect he keeps in touch with them because they are backed by large organisations.

So it seems to me that his concern has always been that one day a particular distro he likes will not be there anymore. That particular concern cannot be fully dispelled by MX Devs no matter what. It's not backed by any organisation. All it has is the track record and history of the Mepis community and antiX. But it's not something anyone should over-promise on.

[ADDED]
** read his earlier reviews of MX15 or MX16, or find his older reviews for so-called "indie" distros with a small team or single dev. He quite often ended his review by stating his concern about the distro's longevity.

[JayM]

There are no guarantees that even Debian, CentOS, Arch, *buntu or Slackware won't go belly-up at any time. Same for, I suppose, Microsoft or Apple. Companies do go bankrupt, or get bought out, or are destroyed by vulture capitalists. Volunteer devs of Linux distros do get burned out sometimes, get their dream-come-true day job and don't have time to support their distro anymore, or decide to move to Bali and join a Buddhist monastery. Whatever. Life is uncertain, which is why you should always eat dessert first.

It's the one-person distros like PCLOS that kind of worry me. What if something happened to Texstar, God forbid? He's pretty much the lone developer, package manager and support lead for that distro. People might end up PCLOSless. I'm not too worried that MX is going away within my lifetime, and I'm not even that concerned that it will change in a direction I can't live with (dropping 32-bit system support, changing to systemd init, scrapping Xfce in favor of Unity or whatever that awful Ubuntu touchscreen-centric DE was called, dropping support for computers with <Core i5 CPUs. Ain't happening.) Some devs may go, new faces may come to replace them, but the fact that y'all operate as teams is heartening.

Maybe MX needs a corporate sponsor? I suggest Volkswagen: then you can promise people the moon and just fudge the numbers to make it look as though you're meeting your goals.

[KBD]

MX and its folks aren't going anywhere. They stuck together even after SimplyMEPIS died. How many groups do that? Then they started their own distro built with help from AntiX. This is not a "fly by night" group :)

[Stevo]

...
It's the one-person distros like PCLOS that kind of worry me. What if something happened to Texstar, God forbid? He's pretty much the lone developer, package manager and support lead for that distro. People might end up PCLOSless.
...

Woah...I guess you haven't kept up with the PCLOS news, then.
My personal prediction is that their community will step up and continue the distro.

[Artim]

Even Crunchbang survives under a new name and different devs, but it had such a faithful and loyal following it just couldn't be allowed to disappear. Some distros are like that: Immortal no matter what because a "fan base" will do all kinds of stuff to keep a great thing going.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Even Crunchbang survives under a new name and different devs

Not really, the #! repositories died some time ago and both BunsenLabs and #!++ use their own repositories.

Users of #! were always advised to perform a fresh install at the BL forums and BL has moved on quite a bit compared to #!, or at least it had when I was still involved.

[JayM]

...
It's the one-person distros like PCLOS that kind of worry me. What if something happened to Texstar, God forbid? He's pretty much the lone developer, package manager and support lead for that distro. People might end up PCLOSless.
...

Woah...I guess you haven't kept up with the PCLOS news, then.
My personal prediction is that their community will step up and continue the distro.

No, I haven't been.
https://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201807/page01.html
I'll miss him even though I'm not using that distro any more. I remember one time where I had some issues after a large update and I posted that the update broke my computer. He replied something like, "No, I think your computer broke my update!" I had to laugh out loud at that. (Edit: I found the very topic and his reply: https://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.p ... 09057.html)

Per the article I cited he's hand-picked a team of successors, so hopefully they'll continue to maintain and improve PCLOS. It's still among my favorite distros and I'd probably still be using it today if it supported full-disk encryption on installation better: never being able to make that work is what prompted me to start distro-hopping again after several years with PCLOS and ended up with me choosing Mint as the least-bad alternative (I wish I'd discovered MX at that time though.)