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You know what we really need at this point is an OS that doesn't change (or rarely changes), with the exception of security patches and new hardware support. Modern OS's already do everything a typical user needs them to do. The constant changes, new versions, etc just lead to what I will call "technical exhaustion". Tons of time gets spent by people just trying to keep things "up to date", which is fine for tech geeks who have the time and love the latest things, but it costs a lot of people and a lot of businesses a lot of time and money when the older versions were working fine for most of them.
From the OS development company's standpoint in a market economy, I can understand. The desire for them is to keep releasing new versions for people to spend money on, and to encourage upgrades by canceling support for older versions. But don't you think it's about time for a stable Linux release whose purpose is to be a low cost long lived low maintenance OS? Something where updates are just for security patches and to add new hardware support, and it's all handled by automatic updates? Something that will stop costing companies millions of dollars per year in server maintenance / software upgrades / compatibility testing? Something where even if you installed the OS 2 years ago, it's still up to date thanks to the automatic updates, and you can easily install and run Java 7? Hm... or would that make too much sense?
The way many Linux distributions (i.e. Fedora) are designed, is such that the more frequently you update, the less maintnance it is in the long run.
As far as long-term-stable distributions that still get security updates, they exist (i.e. Debian Stable, RHEL, CentOS) however you often cannot easily install packages made for newer versions (i.e. Java 7 and Fedora 13 situation). To remedy this, one thing that exists for some distributions is a "backports" repository that has newer versions of software build for the old/stable version of the distribution. So far as I can see, one does not exist for Fedora, but one does exist for Debian[1].
Basically, the closest thing that currently exists to what you want probably, is Debian Stable, with the backports repository. Certainly far closer to what you want than Fedora. Unfortunately Java 7 is not among the things in there yet, because backports only includes things from Debian Testing and Java 7 is not in Debian Testing (yet?), only in Debian Unstable.
If you really badly want to be able to install the newest versions while still using a long-term-stable distribution, what would be necessary would be one of two things:
- Building packages for things like Java 7 which build-in the required versions of libraries (as it done on windows). This is doable, but has two major drawbacks: 1) It makes security maintnance significantly more difficult because there are more pieces of software to worry about in each package, and 2) In general is much more work for package maintainers.
- Going further with the "backports repository" concept, trying to include the absolute latest versions, unlike Debian Backports which just includes versions likely to make it into the next major release. This would be nice, but it would be a lot of effort. The likely reason this doesn't exist is because it's rare to find someone with more than two of the three following traits: 1) Interested in long-term-stable releases, 2) Interested in having bleeding-edge versions of software, and 3) Have the time/motivation to make it happen.
