I n some rather pleasing news for users of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, Canonical has announced (https://bit.ly/lxf282canonical) that both LTS versions of the distro will have their lifecycles prolonged to 10 years, in what the company is calling the “Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase.” The idea is that these will give companies that are still using the distros on their machines more time to plan and implement upgrades. As Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Product Manager at Canonical, says, “We are bringing an operating system lifecycle that lets organisations manage their infrastructure on their term.” After the controversy over Red Hat cutting short the CentOS life cycle, it’s good to see Canonical doing the opposite with Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ‘Trusty Tahr’
and 16.04 LTS ‘Xenial Xerus’ will now be supported for 10 years.