Our likely long term future (not) with Ubuntu (as of early 2024)
Quoting: Chris's Wiki :: blog/linux/UbuntuOurLikelyLongtermFuture —
One potential and seemingly likely change that would force us to move away from Ubuntu would be Canonical changing important non-GUI packages to be Snaps instead of .debs that can be installed through apt (they've already moved important GUI packages to Snaps, but we are so far living without them). Snaps simply don't work in our environment and if Canonical forced us, we would rather move to Debian than to try to hack up Ubuntu and our NFS based environment to make them work (for the moment, until Canonical changes something that breaks our hacks). Another potential change that I keep expecting is for Canonical to more or less break the server installer in non-cloud environments, or to require them to provide emulations of cloud facilities (such as something to supply system metadata).
But in the long term I don't think the specific breaking changes are worth trying to predict. The general situation is that Canonical is a commercial company that is out to make money (lots of money), and free Ubuntu LTS for servers (or for anything) is a loss leader. The arc of loss leaders bends towards death, whether it be through obvious discontinuation, deliberate crippling, or simply slow strangulation from lack of resources. Sooner or later we'll have to move off Ubuntu; the only big questions are how soon and how much notice we'll have.
Should we jump before we have to? That may be a question we'll be asking ourselves in 2026, or maybe 2025 when the next Debian release will probably come out.