Ubuntu 18.04 support time will be increased to 10 years

Recently Mark Shuttleworth stated that Canonical will expand Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver LTS support a few years longer than expected.

Mark Shuttleworth announced in his keynote address at the OpenStack Summi conferencet about the increase in the update period of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS version from 5 to 10 years.

The support that Canonical gives to its Ubuntu distribution is greater in the LTS versions (long term support).

Now, it seems that the company wants to increase that support even more, to gain the preference in the companies.

Mark Shuttleworth explained that the increase in the support period is due to a fairly long cycle of product use in the financial industries. and telecommunications, as well as a fairly large life cycle of embedded devices and IoT.

Therefore, the support time for Ubuntu 18.04 has become equal to the industrial distributions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux, which have been supported for 10 years (apart from the additional three-year service for RHEL).

Canonical intends to extend the support of LTS versions of Ubuntu 5 more years

The support period for Debian GNU / Linux, considering the LTS extended support program, it is 5 years.

OpenSUSE versions are supported for 18 months for intermediate versions (42.1, 42.2,…) and 36 months for significant branches (42, 15,…). Fedora Linux is supported for 13 months.

Only the Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver release is explicitly mentioned in the announcement. It is not yet clear if the 10-year support period will apply to the next LTS versions of Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 14.04 LTS, updates are planned for 5 years. For Ubuntu 12.04, there is an ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) program.

Within which the publication of updates with kernel vulnerabilities and the most important system packages have been extended for three years.

Access to ESM updates is limited only to users of a paid subscription to technical support services.

Perhaps in the future it will be decided to extend the ESM program to Ubuntu versions 14.04 and 16.04.

Of course, Mark Shuttleworth didn't talk about it, he talked about many other things.

But in the absence of Canonical clarifying the details, it is worth mentioning Mark Shuttleworth's conference at the OpenStack Summit, as that is the main source of information on that matter at the moment.

Issues Addressed at OpenStack Summit

To better understand the matter you have to review how Ubuntu support works:

• The LTS versions of Ubuntu offer five years of support, but only in the server edition. The desktop edition is three years old, although the remaining two are still covered with security update releases related to the core and basic system software.
• In addition, the LTS versions include since last year the possibility of entering the extended security maintenance program (ESM, or Extended Security Maintenance), a new paid service that provides security updates for at least one year.

With this in mind, Mark Shuttleworth took the stage at the OpenStack Summit:

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS would extend its support to 10 years, as we said yesterday, to recover the delay in relation to what its competitors already offer (Red Hat and SUSE with RHEL and LES), although these two also have an extension of the service up to 13 years.

The question is, the 10 years of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support, what editions do you consider? The only thing Shuttleworth says is that they do it to make it easier to maintain infrastructure in certain industries, like finance or the Internet of Things. Nothing more.

Everything seems to indicate that the desktop edition is not included in this extension of the support, but the measure Is it oriented to the edition is for servers?

The truth is that nothing is very clear. So until Canonical officially comes out on the matter, it all comes down to speculation.