VSCode Drops Ubuntu 18.04 Support

This messed with me too. At work our primary development environment is a farm of older CentOS machines. They all lost support with this vscode upgrade. It probably impacts hundreds of people. I had to send out instructions to downgrade and pin your vscode version while we look for a workaround.

I get that it isn't entirely within the vscode team's control (Electron chose to make the switch), but even then, it really interferes with a lot of people's daily development needs. These systems aren't particularly old or out of support.

Wouldn't this just mean if you're on Ubuntu 18.04 you'd need to manually update glibc to >= 2.28?

18.04 is an LTS release which according to Ubuntu's website ended standard support in April 2023 and still has "Expanded Security Maintenance" until April 2028.

From the article it seems like the real problem is Microsoft didn't adequately communicate the change in advance or provide safety checks when upgrading. It seems like an easy oversight to make though.

Also I'm sympathetic to the numerous situations in which developers have no ability to upgrade old Linux boxes but it seems like Microsoft's not entirely to blame for not supporting a 6 year old Ubuntu release a year after its standard support timeframe.

TL;DR: Situation sucks, seems like a typical Linux dependency issue, hopefully they consider and communicate better in the future.

Can't you just keep using the old version? It's pretty much feature complete after all

Edit: yes the article mentions it so it's not nearly as bad as suggested IMO. If you're on an os from 2018 you're clearly not really dependent on the latest versions of everything.

In the mean time you could start working on the OS upgrade.

I don't really understand the wish for old versions in the Linux world. I use BSD myself which doesn't have this coupling.. You can be on a stable OS but have rolling cutting-edge packages. Pretty ideal for me.

Ubuntu 18.04 is EOL, unless you pay for extended support. How many people are paying for that support?

I hope the people complaining about the VSCode incompatibility aren't people running EOL software and complaining that other people aren't keeping their software compatible with it.

I upgraded a number of servers to Ubuntu 20.04 because Ubuntu 18.04 was EOL. I also upgraded my desktop to Debian 12. ;-)

> If you're on an os from 2018 you're clearly not really dependent on the latest versions of everything.

I'm on Windows 10 which is from 2015. I want the latest software, but an older more stable OS (not Windows 11 yet).

It's true that Windows 10 has had big updates (builds). But maybe that's the right approach?