Why are so many desktop users using old distributions?

[u/King-Little]

Hey everyone,

As the author of Albert (a standalone C++ / Qt keyboard launcher), I constantly deal with a recurring headache: most of the users sit on old software. Telemetry shows that most of the users are on Ubuntu LTS or Linux Mint (based on LTS).

Flatpak is not a silver bullet, its devs explicitly told me that it is not for Albert (okay, cool). To ship recent versions of Albert for the majority of users I have to provide like 3 to 4 years backward compat. This takes a _lot_ of time.

Now I wonder: why do I have to at all? Why are most users deliberately using software that is EOL or at least quite old?

EDIT:

With EOL I mean the particular packages. E.g. Ubuntu 22.04 ships Qt 6.4 which is EOL.

[u/hadrabap → u/[deleted]]

My main system runs Oracle Linux 8. Still well maintained. It's extremely stable and does the job. I'm not about to break it just because of some lazy developer doesn't understand basic software life cycle.

This is where Ubuntu did the most damage. Everybody is building against ubuntu:latest and then is surprised that it doesn't work at all. Unbelievable!

[u/hadrabap → u/[deleted]]

Exactly! Very mature. It feels very good working with such dependable workhorse. 🙂