Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
I've been seeding many Foss things for years but for some reason, people keep downloading Ubuntu versions that are more than 3 years old.
Any ideas why there is always someone downloading the ancient stuff, especially Ubuntu?
I just want to say that you're a MVP for seeding that much for that long. Lots of TBs up there - you've helped out a ton of people.
Thank you.
Yes thank you so much!
Agreed, came here to post a “thank you for your service”
Yes, Ubuntu 20 isn't EOL yet. A lot of those downloads are probably IT staff or developers that are running Ubuntu servers or developing on those versions.
ETA: We still have some RHEL 7 and clones at my day job
Yeah, should've remembered that before asking... Makes sense. Thanks
This man really does have GBs of Linux ISOs
Holy ratio
i tought this post was going to be a "linux ISOs" joje lol
20.04 and 22.04 were LTS versions, aka, long term support.
Any application that requires stability should run on LTS versions. Combined with Ubuntu being one of the most popular distros, makes 20.04 and 22.04 the most popular choices for anything in a home lab and many smaller business needs.
Whether you're building a server for home DNS, or a time server for a small business, then you're probably using Ubuntu as the base.
I think the next LTS version will be 24.04, so things might shift sometime after that.
Correct. Naming of ubuntu is always . of release. The LTS'es are supported for four years, so when 24.04 is released, the 20.04 will be EOL
I can give you an answer from someone who regularly downloads really old EOL versions of Ubuntu and Debian. I personally use them as part of attack and defense competitions. They are normally very close to unusable and are nearly impossible to update to a more recent or secure version. This forces my team to find creative ways to keep them working while also taking measures to isolate them as much as possible. I also use them to teach old exploits that have been patched in more recent versions, walking people through how it worked and why it existed.
It happens a lot more with Windows machines, but there might be some manufacturing systems out there that require software that won't run on modern versions of the OS. These systems often require new manufacturing tools in order to upgrade, or they need massive overhauls that smaller companies can't always afford.
FOSS hero. 💜
Gotta download at least a few actual Linux ISOs to be a real datahoarder.
People download fake Linux ISO's? What even are those? I have no idea. No idea at all.
Yea I have 100tb of these weird Linux ISOs, I have no idea how they even got there either.
People desperately trying to avoid snaps by any means possible?
I struggled with those for so long. I'm running Pop now with integrated flathub and all of a sudden Linux is fun again!
Data hoarders? People rolling back to older versions? Those are my best guesses.
I assume it's not human driven. Maybe some automated archiver? Some bot looking for proof of pirated content, and just downloads everything it finds?
Right, that sounds like a good guess. That makes sense, bots are everywhere.
Some of it may be, but the fact that the LTS versions (20.04 & 22.04) are downloaded overwhelmingly more than the others seem to indicate it's more intentional.
Do old versions of Linux (Ubuntu in this instance) run better on really old hardware? That might be a reason if so.
I worked at a place which was still using a 20.04 version (for products they were selling) because updating it would require spending any amount of time updating software. Path of least resistance is using the old os forever.
10 years ago I was working at a place that still used an Apple ][e
It controlled a ROM burner that was vital to the manufacturing process. In a back room was a stack of backup ][e s just in case the production one should ever fail. In the years I worked there it never did.
We had an old 286 running the HVAC at a hospital I worked at. This was a hospital with about 2000 employees in a major American city.
Sir, you are a hero. Thank you for your service.
Systemd haters? But seriously, this could well be because of business environments where applications require specific OS versions to keep being supported by the vendor. Or better: where the orchestration tool cannot be updated because of the old OSs while said OSs cannot be updated because it will break orchestration.
This is why people love containers: you can run insecure software on insecure OS (component)s while pretending to be in control on your shiny Kubernetes cluster.
I occasionally have to download and run old versions in a VM to build poorly supported software.
E.g. step 1 of the build instructions here...
Install the following packages in an ubuntu - 14.04.6 LTS machine
ITT: speculation by people that clearly don't use/understand Ubuntu.
I once downloaded a really old (like 10 years old) ubuntu iso, because I had an app in deb format made for that version, that needed older libraries to run. Perhaps, there were other ways to run it, but running the older iso in a vm worked fine.
22.04 still isn't FIPS validated yet, so if you need FIPS with Ubuntu pro, the most recent LTS distro you can get is 20.04. That's why 20.04 is still popular.