Given the recent dramatic uptick in vulnerability discoveries, it's also prone to being quite insecure...

LTS still typically get security updates. That's what the support in long term support means.

This gets thrown around a lot, but it's not entirely true. Depending on the particular distro, only certain core packages are likely to get updates on LTS releases. Non-core packages may just get left to rot until the next LTS release. Specifically Ubuntu follows this. A lot of their non-core packages just get imported from Debian and then just sit unmaintained until next release (this goes doubly if not using Ubuntu Pro).

	▲	thewebguyd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Especially frightening when you look at how much everyday stuff is actually in the Universe repo in Ubuntu. Without Ubuntu Pro, your LTS system can sit in a very insecure state for a long time as patching Universe is "best effort" from the community. Most popular GUI stuff is from universe, as are quite a few dev tools. Some examples: Gimp, Inkscape, pip (and a ton of python packages), most of gnome, a big chunk of KDE, htop, mariadb, etc. See for yourself grep -h "^Package:" /var/lib/apt/lists/_universe__Packages \| awk '{print $2}' \| sort -u Or to see only what you have installed from Universe: comm -12 <(dpkg-query -f '${Package}\n' -W \| sort) <(grep -h "^Package:" /var/lib/apt/lists/_universe__Packages \| awk '{print $2}' \| sort -u) A big repo isn't always better.