Canonical increases commercial Extended Long Term Support for Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04

Canonical, the company behind the Linux distribution Ubuntu, announced an increase of the extended long term support of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) and 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) to ten years.

The official end of life was already a while ago: The official and public support of 14.04 ended in April 2019, five years after the release. For the 16.04 it was April 2021 end of life (we wrote about the EOL of Ubuntu Xenial and the upgrade gotchas).

However the Ubuntu ESM (Extended Security Maintenance), a commercial extended support, kicked in after the official EOL. The ESM was initially planned to further support Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 for an additional 3 years (until 2022 for Ubuntu 14.04 and until 2024 for Ubuntu 16.04) but Canonical has now extended the ESM support to 2024 for Ubuntu 14.04 and to 2026 for Ubuntu 16.04.

This means the total of supported years (including commercial support) is now a full decade per LTS version.

The newer and still active LTS versions 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) and 20.04 (Focal Fossa) are already defined with a total of ten years of support.

In a separate article we have prepared an updated list of Linux distributions with long term support (LTS).