Question about Ubuntu support

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 29 May 2020 01:40:11 -0400, Rashkae wrote:
>Clear as mud, ain't it?.  I don't think there a definite list of what
>packages will be patched past the 3 years.  But aside from the
>glaringly obvious, Firefox, chome/chromium, Thunderbird... does it
>really matter?

Hi,

time to spread some fear, uncertainty and doubt ;).

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS, End of Standard Support April 2021.
You shouldn't expect that Internet related applications still work
without radical limitations. As a power user I was able to fix some of
those issues for a while, but it reached a level where this became
impracticable.

Actually users should only expect support for software from Main, see:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Main
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Restricted
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Universe
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Multiverse

However, at this point of time, a year before End of Standard Support
Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS is rendered more or less useless regarding Internet
compatibility, what ever repository is used. It already was fishy a
long, long time ago.

Somebody likely will argue against it, claim that Ubuntu 16.04.6 is
still functioning, even for Internet related apps. Sure, as long as the
MUA doesn't use particular Internet providers, as long as you avoid
viewing some webpages etc. . For uninformed users using this LTS very
early became already a serious security risk, see
https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial-updates/libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 and still
provided for 18.04, too, see
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 .
Dropped >= 19.10, which is a little bit late for such a vulnerable, by
upstream discontinued web thingy, but as you can see, it's from the
"universe" repository, not from "main".

In a nutshell:

It depends, if a release is stable for a painting application, a
digital workstation and software like this, it will stay stable forever,
even 100 years after EOL. Just new features aren't supported.

OTOH Internet related and probably some other domain's apps, too, could
get broken long before End of Standard Support, without taking security
risks into account, new features could become vital for those apps to
work. Needed authentication features, displaying some image formats
used by websites etc. might never make it into a release.

Regards,
Ralf