The maintenance period for the LTS branch of the Debian 9 "Stretch" distribution, formed in 2017, has come to an end. The release of updates for the LTS branch was handled by a separate LTS Team, made up of enthusiasts and representatives of companies interested in a long-term supply of updates for Debian.
In the near future, the initiative group will begin to form a new LTS branch based on Debian 10 "Buster", the regular support of which will expire on July 7, 2022. The LTS Team will take over from the Security Team and continue support without interruption. The release of updates for Debian 10 will be extended until June 30, 2024 (later LTS support will be provided for Debian 11, updates for which will be released until 2026). As with Debian 9, LTS support for Debian 10 and Debian 11 will only cover the i386, amd64, armel, armhf, and arm64 architectures, with a total support period of 5 years.
At the same time, the end of LTS support does not mean the end of the life cycle of Debian 9.0 - as part of the extended program "Extended LTS", Freexian has expressed its readiness to release updates on its own until June 30, 2027 with the elimination of vulnerabilities in a limited set of packages for the amd64, armel and i386 architectures . Many packages will not be supported, including the Linux 4.9 kernel, which will be replaced with a 4.19 kernel backported from Debian 10. Updates are distributed via 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.
Recall that Debian's short and unpredictable support period, which averaged three years and depended on the development of a new release, was one of the main obstacles to the adoption of Debian in enterprises. With the introduction of the LTS and Extended LTS initiatives, this obstacle has been removed and Debian's support time has been extended to seven years from the date of release, which is more than the five-year LTS releases of Ubuntu, but three years less than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, which are supported 10 years.
Source: opennet.ru