The support period for the LTS branch of the Debian 9 "Stretch" distribution, created in 2017, has come to an end. Updates for the LTS branch were released by a separate group of developers from the LTS Team, formed from enthusiasts and representatives of companies interested in the long-term supply of updates for Debian.
In the near future, an initiative group will begin forming a new LTS branch based on Debian 10 "Buster," whose standard support ended on July 7, 2022. The LTS Team will take over from the Security Team and will continue support without interruption. Updates for Debian 10 will be extended until June 30, 2024 (further LTS support will be provided for Debian 11, with updates being released until 2026). Like Debian 9, LTS support for Debian 10 and Debian 11 will only cover the architectures i386, amd64, armel, armhf, and arm64, with a total support duration of 5 years.
The end of LTS support does not mean the end of the life cycle for Debian 9.0 — as part of the Extended LTS program, Freexian has expressed its readiness to provide updates addressing vulnerabilities in a limited set of packages for the architectures amd64, armel, and i386 until June 30, 2027. Support will not cover many packages, including the Linux kernel 4.9, which will instead be replaced by kernel 4.19 backported from Debian 10. Updates are distributed through an external repository maintained by Freexian. Access is free for all interested parties, and the range of supported packages depends on the total number of sponsors and their packages of interest.
It’s worth noting that the unpredictable and short support duration of Debian, which averaged three years and depended on the activity of new release development, was one of the main barriers to the adoption of Debian in enterprises. With the introduction of LTS and Extended LTS initiatives, this obstacle has been removed, extending Debian's support time to seven years from the release date, which is longer than the five-year LTS releases of Ubuntu but three years shorter than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, which are supported for 10 years.
Source: opennet.ru
