this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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LTS just means staying on the same release and guaranteed support for that time which is important for businesses. As a consumer you can always just do a release upgrade.
Since most businesses rely on Windows anyway, that's pretty much irrelevant for this discussion. They cannot use Chromebooks either.
The original assertion was that a Chromebook becomes useless ewaste when the software updates stop. But as of today Chromeos gets software updates for longer than any Linux distro major release (10 years ChromeOS vs 5 years for Linux). You can install Linux on that Chromebook after Google stops supporting it just the same as the Windows laptop after Dell stops supporting it. And there's CloudReady and Chromium. Theyre not ewaste without Google updates, you have options.
Linux receives updates forever. The point of LTS kernels is not to stay on them forever but to have to do less testing. It's not very likely that upgrading kernels will break something but it can happen so businesses can stay on LTS kernels and continue to get critical security fixes and they'll only have to update and test once a new LTS kernel comes out. The average person should use the regular kernel and that's also the default on pretty much all distros
Comparing ChromeOS updates to LTS kernel updates makes no sense, especially since the LTS kernel can just be updated to a newer version if that specific version doesn't get updated anymore.
But contrary to Linux or even Windows (unless they pull some hardware requirement shit again) you need to switch to another OS and not simply do a release upgrade.