19

Apparently Shuttleworth announced at the OpenStack Summit that Ubuntu 18.04 will have ten years of support (originally cited ZDnet article). But neither the Ubuntu website nor the Ubuntu wiki have been updated to reflect that.

What exactly is included in this ten-year support?

I'm not looking for speculation or guesses or indications. I'm looking for verifiable, official information.

Elder Geek
  • 36,023
  • 25
  • 98
  • 183
muru
  • 197,895
  • 55
  • 485
  • 740
  • 1
    Consider to add link to the official Ubuntu blog (search for "10 years" and cite this part). – N0rbert Nov 16 '18 at 21:48
  • Meh. All that has is the same quote shown everywhere else, buried deep down. – muru Nov 16 '18 at 21:49
  • Looks like it was announced yesterday. Canonical isn't Apple, so I doubt they're able to update documentation as quickly as a large consumer brand like that. – TheWanderer Nov 16 '18 at 21:57
  • But once would expect a decision with a 10 year impact being thoroughly documented before the announcement, so all you need to do is actually post the documentation. Unless Shuttleworth did it on the spur of the moment, ... which wouldn't inspire confidence. – muru Nov 16 '18 at 22:00
  • 3
    Ubuntu 18.04 LTS currently has five years of free support. At the end of those years you can extend it to ESM (paid contract) for additional years. 12.04 ESM had an additional three years initially (5+3=8) so Mark is just saying Ubuntu 18.04 will have 5 years as LTS & 5 years as ESM (2 years extra that 12.04 LTS/ESM had) He's removing the marketing-plus RedHat had with it's 10 year life of RHEL/CentOS.. in my opinion – guiverc Nov 16 '18 at 22:17
  • 5
    I reported bug 1803786 against ubuntu-support-status as an attempt to get official position about 10 years EOL for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. – N0rbert Nov 16 '18 at 22:21
  • 1
    Logically he's just announcing to industry early (3 yrs.) that 18.04 will get the ESM option. Looking at 14.04 ESM was announced about 9 months prior to availability. – doug Nov 16 '18 at 23:56
  • See the video by yourself and make your own conclusions. https://youtu.be/V10cgn_avJE?t=406 – NickTux Nov 18 '18 at 14:07
  • 2
    Those 10 years is part of the "Ubuntu advantage" support plan. If you want it: it costs 150 euro a year with a minimum of 50 desktops. The extended support for 12.04 is 8 year (april 2020) and that will be extended to 10 years for 18.04. – Rinzwind Nov 18 '18 at 18:28

1 Answers1

10

The Releases page has some clear dates for how long security support will last.

For 18.04, it's 5 years of standard security support + 5 years of ESM (ESM = "Extended Security Maintenance").

  • 2019-03-04 - first public list for 14.04 ESM.
  • 2017-04-13 - first public list for 12.04 ESM.

We (Canonical) do need to improve on publishing the ESM source package list more in advance.

From either list on the Releases page you can see what packages were included in previous releases to get a general idea. Desktop packages are not being considered.

I'll update this answer as we publish more.

gQuigs
  • 455
  • 4
  • 10