Conversation

Free Software distributions are self supported systems. Many think that self-supported means there’s no helpdesk, and they don’t need one. But "self supported" really means that you're the one responsible for the maintenance of your systems. You can choose not to follow upstream releases, but if you're not participating in CVE review and backporting patches, it might not get done. That’s the real price of Free Software.

There are a lot of distributions to choose from, and many of them are built on a foundation of one or another "LTS" system.

Some developers do this because they believe the "LTS" foundation does most of the work, so they don't have to. But that assumption might be broken. If everyone uses the LTS as a way to avoid doing the heavy lifting, then the heavy lifting doesn't actually get done, and you have a foundation that's mostly unmaintained.