The end of support for the LTS branch of the Debian 11 "Bullseye" distribution, established in 2021, has been announced. Updates for the LTS branch were provided by a separate group of developers known as the LTS Team, formed from enthusiasts and representatives of companies interested in the long-term supply of updates for Debian.
Following the end of LTS support, the company Freexian will ensure the provision of updates addressing vulnerabilities in a limited set of packages for architectures i386, amd64, armhf, and arm64 under the extended program "Extended LTS" until June 30, 2031, for Debian 11. Updates will be distributed through an external repository maintained by Freexian, with free access for all interested parties. The list of supported packages will depend on the total number of sponsors and the packages of interest.
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
