LTS lifecycle for Ubuntu

Although security is a very important subject (one of the most important), I’d take the opportunity focus on the "LTS lifecycle".

What got my attention when I moved my private and "work" desktops, netbooks and laptops to Ubuntu back in 2006 was the fact that main goal of Ubuntu with the "Long Term Support" was the "support", meaning: planning, work goals, security updates, patches and documentations available online, and having people talk/blog about how they fix bugs and explaining there solutions, this is the real meaning of the word "ubuntu". But sadly now I have to move soon from 14.04.5 (ie I will be forced to upgrade) to 18.04.x, in the next few weeks because of the deadline.

From a business point perspective, the LTS lifecycle, considering the maturity and stability of a distribution, only is achieved after 3 or more years of using, troubleshooting, creating, cross-compiling, ... lots of hard work,  showing that you need to set at least 8 (eight) years as the goal for LTS!

I say this in respect to the great effort and cost to upgrade a version, which impacts considerably the working environment not only for the home, small, to medium and big companies, specially when the hardware takes longer to update, in realty, in most countries (ie. Africa, South America, middle East, etc) at least 8 to 10 years is quite common.

As an example, my main working desktop, here in Brazil, which I do most of my work, is a Gigabyte model: 965P-DS3, with a GeForce GT610, Intel Core2Duo 6300 with 8GB of RAM and 500GB HDD, which is an excellent work station for my needs, not only for work, but for Internet browsing, banking, YouTube, office, etc. But with limited BIOS features, makes it a real challenge and pain to upgrade (specially for a fresh install).

It is not only a question of buying a new hardware, which in my case, and in many countries, can be a very expensive step (can cost up to 3x the price compared to the USA market), but also because of ecological consciousness, carbon footprint, and who really thinks about "ubuntu".