Seeking an extended-support O/S similar to FreeBSD

[Freddie Cash]

I'm confused.

Every other minor release of FreeBSD is supported for 2 full years, with no
new features added, just security fixes (aka Extended Releases).

And every major release of FreeBSD is supported for at least 4, somtimes 5,
years.

Canonical just shortened their support for LTS to 3 years, including server
releases. And you can't get new versions of software on Ubuntu without
upgrading the OS or adding random PPA repos. Sometimes you can get a
backports repo, but they aren't officially supported. And only the official
repos get security updates (if you're lucky).

RedHat isn't much better. Sure, they'll support the core OS for 5 years,
but you can't install new, up-to-date software on it unless you upgrade the
entire OS (been down that road too many times to ever want to try again).
We gave up on RedHat after fighting with 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x.

FreeBSD isn't perfect (what OS is?), but it's amazing that you can install
the newest versions of MySQL, Firefox, KDE, Postfix, etc on 7.4 (until the
end of Feb, anyway), or 8.3, or 9.0, or 9.1. And can continue to get
security fixes for all those releases (except 7.x now).

Good luck installing any of those onto a Linux release from 2-3 years ago.

What's missing from FreeBSD support?