Personally I think it would be of great benefit if Enterprise vendors just stopped doing that extremely long term support. It just enables the people who want to pretend they can stop the world around them and those people are bad for everyone, especially in a security context but also because they pretend that “stability” is achieved by using old versions.
Agreed at a certain point supporting an old enough ABI is just a practice in preservation and shouldn’t be where any serious work is done on.
There are still companies that treat software development as if they craving stone for future generations instead of living collections of logic, idioms, and ideas (that reasonbly should be expected to adapted or replaced as conditions change!)
I hope that the community at large can wrestle kernel livepatching away from the commercial distros. No reason the big names should have a monopoly on that.
Even where those are concerned, it’s not a silver bullet for seamlessly jumping major kernel versions, but it’s a start.
I think Arch has FOSS support kernel live patching Nixos also has an open issue where they seem to be discussing an implementation they might consider.
With upstream support and kpatch being FOSS I think the willingness is just low to maintain patches at a distro level and announcing it as a thing you can do yourself has limited audience.
I agree its super cool though and with containers and some of systems work for system level reboots and portable services I see a lot of potential for high uptime systems (like my laptop lol).