TL;DRDevelopers say .NET’s three-year LTS support is too short, with half of deployed versions running unsupported and Java offering five years or more.
A developer has reopened a long-standing complaint about Microsoft’s support policy for its .NET development platform, arguing in a new GitHub issue that the three-year window for long-term support releases is too short for enterprise upgrade cycles. The current release model gives even-numbered versions three years of free support and odd-numbered versions 18 months. The legacy .NET Framework, which is tied to Windows and supported for much longer, is increasingly abandoned by the broader ecosystem.
The core problem, as described in the issue opened earlier this month, is that when a new LTS release arrives, two of the three years on the previous one have already elapsed. That leaves enterprises roughly one year to complete the upgrade, a timeline that is fast even for well-resourced teams. The developer also noted that potential customers are reluctant to adopt software that is already approaching its end-of-life date.
Another developer commenting on the issue said telemetry showed about 50 percent of deployed versions of their software were running on versions Microsoft no longer supports. They added that they try to use the legacy .NET Framework wherever possible because its support is tied to the Windows lifecycle, but that is getting harder as libraries and frameworks drop support for it.
