Canonical, the publisher of the Linux Ubuntu operating system, announced Tuesday that it’s extending the end-of-life dates for its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr and 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus OSes from eight to 10 years. The company said the extension will allow organizations to balance infrastructure upgrade costs by giving them additional time to implement their plans. The extended security maintenance of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS provides customers security updates and kernel patches from Canonical. 

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“There are hundreds of thousands of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 instances still in use today,” said Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, product manager at Canonical. “We found out that there is not one size fits all on the life cycle management, as different industries and sectors adopt technologies on different timeframes. We are extending Ubuntu’s life cycle to remain the platform of choice for users who value stability and long-term maintenance.” 

Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 both had eight-year life cycle support (five years of standard support and three years ESM support). Each now have 10 years of support (five years of standard support and five years ESM support). The 10-year life cycle is now a standard across all Ubuntu LTS releases (20.04, 18.04, 16.04 and 14.04).

The new end-of-life date for 14.04 is now April 2024 instead of April 2022. The new end-of-life date for 16.04 is now April 2026 instead of April 2024. The changes take effect immediately.

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All existing customers can take advantage of this extension at no additional cost and without any configuration change on the updated systems, he said. This applies to Ubuntu Advantage and Ubuntu Pro subscriptions as well as the free personal subscriptions. New customers can take advantage of the offer, as well. 

According to Canonical’s ESM webpage, “ESM is available through an Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure subscription for physical servers, virtual machines, containers and desktops, and is free for personal use. Ubuntu Pro premium images are optimised for the public cloud and provide security maintenance for high and critical CVEs for the entire collection of software packages shipped with Ubuntu.”

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