Wow, really? That's nothing! No security updates after that?
> Ubuntu 1404 LTS has support until 2019
That sounds more reasonable. But still a bit short.
> RHEL 7 has support until 2024 (and Centos).
Interesting. Now I understand why I hear "centos" so often lately. So far, I only know Debian based distros. I wonder how much work it would be to switch to one of these two.
Long term support is great and all but Red Hat can only support so much, the libraries and any other ecosystem that is part of that software or programming language will be dropped by group that are responsible for it. That was my take away from the post/user comments.
In general Debian is pretty rock solid imo and as a good system admin you should stay a version or two behind and you should be pretty set imo. Waiting until 2024 is crazy in term of updates and such, I rather go OpenBSD route if you want to go that long.
(That being said, if obsolete version in RHEL fits the purpose of the user, that's great, and there is no reason for getting a new version, but it's wrong for those people to pressure developers for supporting old versions, and it's immoral for foss developers to continue supporting 10 year old releases at the expense of holding back progress. there was a post regarding that point lately, I'll try to find the link)
"Few months" being almost 6 months (Python 2.5 was released on September 19th 2006[1], Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga), 14 March 2007[2])
[1] https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.5/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#RHEL_5
First of all, it's 2018, not 2017. For the latter point, there is now a LTS project, which provides +2 year after offical support ends, but they only support squeeze for now (since wheezy is on offical support and jessie is not released) and AFAIK it's not decided yet if jessie will be supported by LTS or not. So it may extend to 2020.
If you want certainty on this regard Ubuntu LTS is also a pretty good choice.
On CentOS, I don't use it so I can't comment on it in depth, but beware that number of offically supported packages are much smaller compared to Debian, so make sure the packages you want to use are supported. (There are semi-offical/unoffical repositories, but they may not be maintained as well as offical packages.) (Actually that same point applies to Ubuntu also, as only main and restricted archives are supported by Canonical and universe/multiverse is where big number of packages reside in.)
