Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubunu 16.04 Support Has Been Extended to 10 Years

Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) have had their lifespan extended to 10 years.

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.

RELEASERELEASE DATEEND OF LIFE
Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)April 17, 2014April 2024
Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)April 21, 2016April 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, Ubuntu’s 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 you’d like to see more information about Ubuntu ESM, check out the Ubuntu pages on the topic.

Bobby Borisov

Bobby Borisov

Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.

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