Extended support for Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 extended to 10 years

Canonical has announced an increase in the upgrade period of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 LTS distributions from 8 to 10 years. The open-source platform developer previously took a similar step for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04.

So, Ubuntu 14.04 users will receive operating system updates until April 2024, Ubuntu 16.04 until April 2026, Ubuntu 18.04 until April 2028 and Ubuntu 20.04 until April 2030.

Half of the 10-year maintenance will be done through Extended Security Maintenance (ESM), which includes fixing vulnerabilities in the kernel and most critical system packages.

Access to ESM updates is limited to users with paid technical support subscriptions. For regular users, access to updates is granted only for the first five years after the distribution release.

As for other Linux distributions, only SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux boast a 10-year support period.

Debian GNU/Linux, including the Extended LTS support program, is supported for 5 years, plus an additional 2 years of Extended LTS support. Fedora Linux is supported for 13 months and openSUSE for 18 months.

Source: ubuntu