Which distros have Ubuntu-style LTS releases?

[Peon]

Quite frankly, I don't like the direction Ubuntu is headed towards, so I don't think I'll be upgrading to 12.04 LTS when it comes out.

Unfortunately, that leaves a hole in my Linux lineup - VMware doesn't really support major guest OS upgrades (something always goes wrong, leaving the VM crippled at best and unusable at worst), so I'm forced to create a new VM and reinstall every time I want to upgrade a VM. I'd like to do that as little as possible, so I need a distro with an LTS style release.

[Baserk]

Keep an eye on Mint 13 LTS with Cinnamon DE. You'll have to wait until may though.

[f4ding]

What do you mean LTS style release? Can you be more specific? CentOS/Scientific Linux and Debian are two examples that provide support (updates) for a few years. All others are short term distros, i.e. updates are stopped after a year or so and you have to upgrade = reinstall.

Then there's rolling distros like Arch or OSuse Rolling that pretty much get updated continuously without having to reinstall, but certain specialy software not maintained by the maintainers might break once in a while.

[Peon]

LTS as in updates are provided for several years.

Unfortunately, none of the rolling release distros work with VMware, or they would definitely be my first choice.

[f4ding]

So you're actually looking for distros that you don't have to reinstall for several years. I would go Debian stable, or if you don't mind RPM base distro, Scientific Linux 6. I'm using CentOS 6 myself, and they're pretty much the same thing (as is RHEL 6).

[Thomas]

Unless you have a definite need for VMWare, almost all distros work excellently in Virtualbox.

[Peon]

It's not really a definite need, it's just that VMware still has much better support for Windows guests. For instance, VMware has invested tons of time and money over the past few years to keep up with Parallels in things like DirectX and now does almost everything a DX9 era GPU can, whereas VirtualBox still considers 3D graphics support as a medium-low priority issue at best.

I tried running both at the same time (VMware for Windows, VirtualBox for Linux) about a year or two ago, but they don't play nice together - VMware is fine with sharing, but VirtualBox demands exclusive use of the VT-x bit so it won't boot any VMs if VMware is running anything.

I've always seen VirtualBox as having lots of potential, but also very rough around the edges - if VirtualBox were to polish those edges, I'd drop my VMware license in a heartbeat.

[mujtaba]

Originally Posted by f4ding

So you're actually looking for distros that you don't have to reinstall for several years. I would go Debian stable, or if you don't mind RPM base distro, Scientific Linux 6. I'm using CentOS 6 myself, and they're pretty much the same thing (as is RHEL 6).

Stable Debian is probably too outdated for most users. Using a less known distro means a lot more headaches at troubleshooting, so I would suggest well supported and user-oriented releases such as Ubuntu (and the derivatives), Suse, Fedora and Mageia.

[ThinkRob]

Originally Posted by mujtaba

Stable Debian is probably too outdated for most users. Using a less known distro means a lot more headaches at troubleshooting, so I would suggest well supported and user-oriented releases such as Ubuntu (and the derivatives), Suse, Fedora and Mageia.

Debian is not a "lesser known distro". In fact, since Ubuntu is based on it, if anything it's one of the biggest distros with some of the most widely-deployed package collections in the world.

And "outdated"? Depends on what you want. You can have stability or the latest greatest software, but you can't have both. Debian is more up to date than SLED or RHEL/CentOS/SL. It's also got backports.debian.org, which means that for most software for which recent versions are a near-necessity (browsers, IM programs, X.org drivers) you can get them without having to move to testing or unstable (or another distro).

Really, it depends on the user. For most users, no, it's not outdated. For people who just want a working, stable system it's probably fine. For people who want to know they're running the latest/cutting-edge/etc. there are other distros that focus on that -- just don't expect the level of reliability and stability that Debian offers.

[ALLurGroceries]

CentOS and Scientific Linux are both great choices if you are looking for long term support, but not bleeding edge hardware support.

Of course Debian Stable (with backports) would get my vote too.