Canonical has announced an extension of the update formation period for the LTS releases of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 from 8 to 10 years. A similar decision to extend the support period was previously made for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04. Thus, updates will be released for Ubuntu 14.04 until April 2024, for Ubuntu 16.04 until April 2026, for Ubuntu 18.04 until April 2028, and for Ubuntu 20.04 until April 2030.
Half of the 10-year support period will be covered under the ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) program, which includes updates addressing vulnerabilities for the kernel and the most critical system packages. Access to ESM updates is restricted to users with a paid technical support subscription. Regular users will only have access to updates for five years from the release date.
As for other distributions, a 10-year support period is provided for SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions (not counting the extended three-year additional service for RHEL). The support period for Debian GNU/Linux, considering the extended LTS support program, is 5 years (plus optionally another two years under the 'Extended LTS' initiative). Fedora Linux is supported for 13 months, while openSUSE is supported for 18 months.
Source: opennet.ru
