since shuttleworth said a while ago that ubuntu 18 bionic beaver will be supported for 10 years now - will bodhi 5 be good for that long too? i had to ask.

Probably not, the 10 years support only goes for ubuntu itself (not kubuntu and the other deratives) and only for the SERVER installations as a desktop environment just cannot be supported for that long unless you got PAID personnel working on backporting patches, like Red Hat (RHEL) does.

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are you related to Mary? thanks for your response but would rather get it from the top than someone else.

This will be interesting to find out. Seems like Bodhi has matched LTS support in the past.

Hey Randy - that is what made me ask the question. I am very curious. I realize they want to develop bodhi more etc.; however it would be nice to keep the 5 running longer and also to eliminate redoing the systems on 3 laptops. in addition, the people running older laptops wouldn't have to worry - and it could be a way of using it as an ad hoc so-called 'legacy' version if you get my analogy.

Just my 2 cents here, and bear in mind that I always upgrade to the latest BL as soon as it's out of Beta, but just because a program/system/application is no longer supported, doesn't mean you HAVE to replace it. You just won't be able to update it or the applications (in all likelihood) that depend on it. As long as it's all working for you, you can keep it going indefinitely.

Back before I was fully Linuxated, I used XP for years after MS told me to stop.

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i just want to make sure the security stuff is all up to date - u= i guess. :-)))

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Like Bob said, You can use it as long as it works, If Ubuntu 18.04 is to be supported for 10 years, which probably will only be maintenance and security updates, Bodhi should keep working. I don't know how long Jeff keeps the old repositories going, but I think the BL 4 is still available until end of life, So I bet BL 5 will be around until Ubuntu 18.04's end of life which will be in 2028.

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thanks - not sure what my fingers were doign on that post though.

Last time I checked, the developers do it for free.

Asking them to commit to a 10-year anything is a bit over-ambitious, and fantasizing, I would think.

...and I suspect that, in 5 years, even the buntu folks will be asking themselves "wtf are we still supporting this sh!t?"

By then, there will have been new processors out that don't have the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities (which can't be made 100% secured by mere patching code)... technology advancements that we haven't thought about today.

There must be some market they are going after, in order to offer 10year support. I don't know what it is... embedded systems maybe? Some government contract that myopically demands a decade support? Who knows... but it's certainly not something required by distro-hoppers, home users, or even your average business folk. In business, a computer is obsolete in 3 years - you must replace your IT equipment in that timeframe or you are paying more in lost employee productivity and downtime in a week than what new equipment costs.

10 years... what are you going to do with 10 year support?

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keep reading your post i guess. over and over and over ad infinitum.


hey bud - i was just asking - talk to shuttleworth about it - he made the decision. obviously you missed my post explaining the thought.... as you say - "WTF!"

OK I can't speak for Jeff but ... to a certain extent I can and do speak for Bodhi.

Traditionally Bodhi has kept old repos around until the end of life for the releases Ubuntu Base.

However, packages we package for Bodhi in said repo are unlikely to be updated after Bodhi's next release. On rare occasion I go back and update a deb file or two on our older repos, if I deem it necessary or just because I want to. But the majority of our packages in Bodhi's repos are Enlightenment or EFL related. With massive changes in EFL seemingly always going on, it is extremely hard if not impossible to update an older deb file in an older Bodhi release without also updating EFL itself, security update or not. Updating efl itself may make necessary updating all packages which rely upon EFL, moksha, modules, themes and EFL apps. This is unlikely to happen security concerns or not, unless some user of said old release volunteers to do so. Currently as far as I know Jeff and I package almost all bodhi deb files and upload them to our repos. Lately this has been mostly me, as Jeff currently lacks time.

More volunteers willing and able to do what is needed around here would help. Mostly what we need is programmers and themers. As we are efl based and efl is relatively unknown to most devs and not well documented to any wishing to learn it and continually undergoing massive changes, developers willing to help us are hard to find. And frankly, IMHO, EFL is not easy to learn or use and lacking in many things compared to gtk or qt or practically any other GUI toolkit. This scares devs away even ones that express an interest in helping. Historically they say they are going to help, try to learn some about it and give up. Ones that already know EFL well are almost universally e-devs and have their own concerns, projects and plans. A few e-devs have helped us here and there and at least two are Bodhi team members, but the majority of all our development falls on Stefan (the waiter) and I. Both Stefan and I are learning as we go and franky I am an older brick mason that happens to know a few things about programming and alot, comparatively speaking, about linux. Franky when it comes to EFl programming and or theming we are both amateurs. We do what we can when we can. And we both have phases where we do alot and phases where we don't do much of anything. My computer time is divided up into things I do for Bodhi and things I do for myself. There are always non bodhi stuff I wish to do, like for example learn more about Haskell. And then are other demands on my free time, like some mathematical research I have been doing. Not to mention RW concerns. I am sure the same is true for Stefan.

Now as to the 10 year thing, that is an extremely long time. Hopefully Bodhi will still be around in 10 years but who knows. Hopefully Enlightenment and EFl will still be around in 10 years also but who knows. And actually the same goes for Jeff and I. And in actuality enlightenment and EFL has been moving more and more towards wayland and away from X. Will Moksha follow I don't know. Furthermore in 10 years wayland itself may be abandoned. All our code that is EFL based in all our repos primarily supports x windows and is untested by us on wayland or any other window system. May or may not work and may be difficult to 'make' work. Backporting any of these changes to our older releases could easily turn into a major endeavour

And then you have other changes going on in EFL. Moksha and many of our EFl apps are using what the e-devs refer to as the legacy EFL API. At some point the e-devs are planning on not supporting these legacy function calls and force all EFL apps to use the modern EFL API. This further complicates backporting any changes to our older releases.

Will Bodhi in 10 years still be Moksha (e17) and EFL based, again I am uncertain. It is conceivable Bodhi may move back to being more pure Enlightenment based within 10 years, if Enlightenment ever reaches a stable enough point to satisfy Bodhi's requirements and or Jeff. It is also conceivable altho unlikely we may move to some other library and window manager. Ten years is a very long time in the IT world.

We therefore advise all our users to update to the latest version of Bodhi. All our development and plans for development occur in the last release. Backporing anything is if it occurs at all is an afterthought.

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thanks ylee for your diligent response. i also appreciate all the hard work you and stefan do for bodhi!

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I second that as well! Thanks!

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rbtylee,
Thank you for your thoughtful answer to this post. I appreciate how helpful you have been as one of the Bodhi developers, and I also appreciate how responsive you have been to me personally when I have found bugs in a efl based app. Since Bodhi has become my preferred Linux distro I feel compelled to help out the project in my limited free time. I am not a programmer, merely a Linux enthusiast, who enjoys his current non tech vocation. However, since you called for developers I'm willing to try learning. Would the following be a good course of steps to follow in order to help you and stephan in the future or do you know a better route for beginners who want to help? Perhaps efl is not for the raw beginner programmer and I should focus my efforts on helping users and financial contributions to the project. I would understand if that is the case as well.
1. Learn Python
2. Go through the Python efl tutorals that are on the Bodhi github site
3. Contact you or stephan for a list of tasks

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