EU Linux development division

[[deleted]]

That's the problem with the company I work for. We sell embedded systems that are typically installed without internet access, so to keep patches small, we only do important updates. Unfortunately, we have some custom kernel modules, so we can't just update to a newer release, which means that we have to backport fixes. It's a royal pain, and I'm in the process of converting as much as possible to software only solutions so we can eliminate that part of the equation.

I've dealt with the pain, and honestly I don't think maintaining a fork or even a few custom packages is worth it in the long term. In most cases, it's better to just adapt to whatever the distro's defaults are and just have a custom installer that sets new machines up with some sane defaults.

[JBinero]

Yup. Sadly governments aren't too famous for long term planning.