According to a blog post by Canonical, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (the last LTS release with Upstart by default) will be supported until April 2026, Ubuntu 16.04 — the last official release with Unity 7 as the default desktop environment — until 2028, Ubuntu 18.04 (the last LTS release with support for 32-bit architecture) until 2030, and Ubuntu 20.04 — the last release with the Firefox package in the central repository — until 2032. In total, 6 LTS releases will be supported simultaneously.
To receive support for 12 years instead of five, a Canonical account is required. This gives access to a subscription for 5 machines.
The change will affect all LTS releases of Ubuntu, including the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 release, which will be supported until 2036.
By comparison, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a support period of 14 years (3 distributions are supported simultaneously), Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones have 10 years (2 distributions simultaneously), Suse Enterprise Linux has 13 years (3 distributions simultaneously), and Debian has 7 years (3 distributions). CentOS Stream has a support period of 5 years (two, with support for the 8th coming to an end soon), Alt Linux SP (one — the 8th), and RedOS (two, with support for the 7th ending soon).
Source: linux.org.ru
