The Debian project has announced the end of the standard support cycle for the Debian 11 'Bullseye' distribution, which was released three years ago. Future updates for vulnerability fixes for Debian 11 will be provided under the Extended Support (LTS) program, which will last until August 31, 2026. The standard support for the current Debian 12 branch will continue until June 10, 2026, after which LTS updates for this branch will be available until June 30, 2028.
Updates for the LTS branch are managed by a separate group of developers known as the LTS Team, formed from enthusiasts and representatives of companies interested in prolonged updates for Debian. The LTS Team will take over from the Debian Security Team and will provide continuous support for Debian 11. Updates will be released only for the i386, amd64, arm64, and armhf architectures.
The long-term support will not be extended to certain packages, such as web applications that cannot and should not be supported for 5 years (for continued use of such packages, backports are recommended). Among the unsupported packages are chromium, consul, xen, tor, phppgadmin, pdns-recursor, salt, snort, slurm-wlm, libreswan, and gpac, as well as all packages from the 'games' section. You can check for unsupported packages in the system using the check-support-status utility included in the debian-security-support package.
After the end of LTS support for Debian 11, an Extended LTS program will be available, under which the company Freexian intends to release vulnerability fixes for a limited set of packages for the amd64, armel, and i386 architectures until 2031. Updates for the 'Extended LTS' branches will be distributed through an external repository maintained by Freexian. Access is free for everyone, and the range of supported packages depends on the total number of sponsors and the packages they are interested in.
It is important to note that the short and unpredictable support period for Debian, which averaged three years and depended on the activity of developing new releases, was one of the main barriers to implementing Debian in enterprises. With the introduction of the LTS and Extended LTS initiatives, this barrier has been removed, and the support time for Debian has been extended to 10 years from the release date. In comparison, the support time for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is 19 years, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux it is 14 years (10 years + 4 years of additional paid service), for Ubuntu it is 12 years (5 years + 7 years of additional paid service), for openSUSE it is 18 months, and for Fedora Linux it is 13 months.
Source: opennet.ru
