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.
Saying “Windows 10 is from 2015” is like saying “Ubuntu is from 2004”.
Those “big updates” in Win 10 that you mention even use more or less the same versioning scheme as Ubuntu using the year and part of the year to identify the release. Windows 10 “22H2” is essentially the same name scheme as Ubuntu “22.10” don’t you think.
Ubuntu 18.04 is contemporary with Windows 10 version 1803. Hmm, I wonder if that came out in March 2018. Oh, it was April 2018 actually? Coincidence? If so, I guess it is also a coincidence that the next version came out in October 2018 ( version 1809 ). What was the next “Windows 10”? Oh look, it was 1903. It did not come out until May. I guess MS has a harder time keeping a schedule than Canonical does.
The real lesson here though is that you should not ship new software as native packages for older distros. If the distro is not updating it, you should not either.
If you want to ship VS Code for older distributions, do it as a Flatpak. If you do not think that is fair, I am sure you must be enjoying the version of VS Code that ships specifically for Windows 10 1803. Or are you using a VS Code installer that ships independently of the OS which targets multiple releases of the OS?
On Ubuntu both the OS and software packages are frozen in time and fixes are backported from newer versions.
It's not the same at all as what Microsoft does. In fact Windows is de facto a rolling OS, a phenomenon which also exists in the Linux world but is much less popular there. A rolling OS user would not have the problem in the article.
It works just fine for me though. It's in the standard FreeBSD package collection.
'Support' is a hollow term when it comes to Microsoft anyway. I deal with their paid 'premium support' regularly at work. It's double outsourced, first to Accenture and then to a ton of tiny companies that know nothing.
I get so much better support from the FreeBSD package maintainers than I've ever had from Microsoft :)
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.