Canonical Extends Support of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 to 10 Years

[MatsuShimizu]

Canonical Extends Support of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 to 10 Years - OMG! Ubuntu

Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 16.04 just got an unexpected support boost from Canonical. Announced today, Canonical says both releases will get an extended 10

www.omgubuntu.co.uk

From OMG Ubuntu: Canonical says both releases will get an extended 10 years of support from their original release date, up from the 5 years originally provided. The commitment brings the older LTS releases in line with the 10 year support period Canonical provide for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS.

As a result, Ubuntu 14.04 is being supported until April 2024, and Ubuntu 16.04 is now supported until April 2026. Both of these releases were “out of support” prior to today’s news. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS hit end-of-life earlier this year, and 14.04 way back in 2019.

The announcement is sure to be welcomed by enterprise, business, and other service customers who run older versions of Ubuntu and can’t (or won’t) upgrade to something more recent. But it’s likely to be welcomed by the few desktop users who still run these versions.

 

[KGIII]

It should be noted that ESM is perfectly free for up to 3 devices. You do need to sign up for it, however.

Official flavors still will only have their 3 years of support, though one could conceivably still keep it going for the full ten years, you run the security risk of flavor-specific software going without updates.

 

[Deleted member 111282]

Its hard to imagine someone or some business running either of them since they're practically legacy software, and each new release is free to download. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but don't older releases (Ubuntu or otherwise) tend to cause issues with programs that need to be up-to-date?

 

[kc1di]

Most enterprise software is updated very seldom for other than security reasons. They feel it cost them way to much time and effort to have the latest cutting edge software/hardware and retrain folks to use it. So if you look at most software written for Big business you'll find it is very stable and only upgraded with what is essential. RHEL and SuSE enterprise and even Debian stable are examples of this what software is updated is thoroughly tested for compatibility and backward compatibility also. So yes many companies are running software 5 to 10 years old with security patches of course. The cutting edge stuff is mostly for home and gaming machines not enterprise. There will be those for whatever reason that will welcome Ubuntu's extended service life. P.S. You won't find may businesses running Arch or rolling release model systems.