There was good news today for all Ubuntu lovers looking jittery at their aging Ubuntu boxes. Ubuntu 14.04 users will receive operating system updates until April 2024, and Ubuntu 16.04 until April 2026.
According to Canonical, this lifecycle extension enables organizations to balance their infrastructure upgrade costs, by giving them additional time to implement their upgrade plan.
| RELEASE | RELEASE DATE | END OF LIFE |
|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) | April 17, 2014 | April 2024 |
| Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) | April 21, 2016 | April 2026 |
These earlier versions of Ubuntu have been maintained for five years under the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) provided by Canonical to the organization, and now they provide ten years of support for paying users.
As noted, in addition to security patches, distributions will also receive updates to the system kernel, system packages, and so on, which will make it possible to keep the OS up to date.
For your information, Ubuntuโs subsequent LTS release, specifically 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) and 20.04 (Focal Fossa), are presently supported for ten several years, that is up to April 2028 and April 2030 respectively.
What’s Ubuntu ESM
Typically, Ubuntu releases get five years of support. An additional five years of support can be purchased through Ubuntu Extended Security Maintenance. The Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) plan is offered by Canonical exclusively only for Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases.
Access to ESM extends LTS release coverage, allowing for continued security fixes for high and critical common vulnerabilities and exposures for the most commonly used packages in the Ubuntu main archive.
Home users can get ESM for three instances free of charge. The official Ubuntu Community members can increase this to up to 50 instances.
If youโd like to see more information about Ubuntu ESM, check out the Ubuntu pages on the topic.
