I hope the people complaining about the VSCode incompatibility aren't people running EOL software and complaining that other people aren't keeping their software compatible with it.
I upgraded a number of servers to Ubuntu 20.04 because Ubuntu 18.04 was EOL. I also upgraded my desktop to Debian 12. ;-)
The extended support is free for consumers.
Edit: yes the article mentions it so it's not nearly as bad as suggested IMO. If you're on an os from 2018 you're clearly not really dependent on the latest versions of everything.
In the mean time you could start working on the OS upgrade.
I don't really understand the wish for old versions in the Linux world. I use BSD myself which doesn't have this coupling.. You can be on a stable OS but have rolling cutting-edge packages. Pretty ideal for me.
I'm on Windows 10 which is from 2015. I want the latest software, but an older more stable OS (not Windows 11 yet).
It's true that Windows 10 has had big updates (builds). But maybe that's the right approach?
Those “big updates” in Win 10 that you mention even use more or less the same versioning scheme as Ubuntu using the year and part of the year to identify the release. Windows 10 “22H2” is essentially the same name scheme as Ubuntu “22.10” don’t you think.
Ubuntu 18.04 is contemporary with Windows 10 version 1803. Hmm, I wonder if that came out in March 2018. Oh, it was April 2018 actually? Coincidence? If so, I guess it is also a coincidence that the next version came out in October 2018 ( version 1809 ). What was the next “Windows 10”? Oh look, it was 1903. It did not come out until May. I guess MS has a harder time keeping a schedule than Canonical does.
The real lesson here though is that you should not ship new software as native packages for older distros. If the distro is not updating it, you should not either.
If you want to ship VS Code for older distributions, do it as a Flatpak. If you do not think that is fair, I am sure you must be enjoying the version of VS Code that ships specifically for Windows 10 1803. Or are you using a VS Code installer that ships independently of the OS which targets multiple releases of the OS?
On Ubuntu both the OS and software packages are frozen in time and fixes are backported from newer versions.
It's not the same at all as what Microsoft does. In fact Windows is de facto a rolling OS, a phenomenon which also exists in the Linux world but is much less popular there. A rolling OS user would not have the problem in the article.
'Support' is a hollow term when it comes to Microsoft anyway. I deal with their paid 'premium support' regularly at work. It's double outsourced, first to Accenture and then to a ton of tiny companies that know nothing.
I get so much better support from the FreeBSD package maintainers than I've ever had from Microsoft :)
I get that it isn't entirely within the vscode team's control (Electron chose to make the switch), but even then, it really interferes with a lot of people's daily development needs. These systems aren't particularly old or out of support.
touch /tmp/vscode-skip-server-requirements-check
patchelf --set-interpreter /opt/glibc/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --set-rpath /opt/glibc/lib:/opt/glibc/lib64 ~/.vscode-server/bin/*/node Warning: you’ll need gmake and all the gnu tools for building, make sure to ../configure with —disable-werror
emacs will always be there for you, when you're ready.
CentOS 7 goes EOL June 30th, so you're pretty close to their end of life (CentOS 8 stream has 2.28, so should still work with the new vscode version, which is why I'm guessing you're talking about 7.)
If you don't already have plans for replacement/upgrading, you really need to have plans.
> VS Code 1.86 (aka the ‘January 2024’ update) saw Microsoft bump the minimum build requirements for the text editor’s popular remote dev tools to ≥glibc 2.28 — but Ubuntu 18.04 LTS uses glibc 2.27, ergo they no longer work.
18.04 is an LTS release which according to Ubuntu's website ended standard support in April 2023 and still has "Expanded Security Maintenance" until April 2028.
From the article it seems like the real problem is Microsoft didn't adequately communicate the change in advance or provide safety checks when upgrading. It seems like an easy oversight to make though.
Also I'm sympathetic to the numerous situations in which developers have no ability to upgrade old Linux boxes but it seems like Microsoft's not entirely to blame for not supporting a 6 year old Ubuntu release a year after its standard support timeframe.
TL;DR: Situation sucks, seems like a typical Linux dependency issue, hopefully they consider and communicate better in the future.
1. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-linux-build-agent/issues...
