Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will reach end of life on April 30, 2019

Sep 19, 2018 16:31 GMT  ·  By

Canonical announced today that it would extend its commercial Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) offering to the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series starting May 2019.

Last year on April 28, 2017, when the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system series reached end of life, Canonical announced a new way for corporate users and enterprises to receive security updates if they wanted to keep their current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installations and had no plans to upgrade to a newer LTS (Long Term Support) release. The offering was called Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and had a great success among businesses.

Now, after almost five years since its release, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) is also approaching end of life, which will happen next spring on April 30, 2019. Therefore, Canonical announced today that it plans to extend the ESM program to users of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating system who are willing to pay for security updates after the support period of five years.

"Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) was introduced for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a way to extend the availability of critical and important security patches beyond the nominal End of Life date of Ubuntu 12.04," said Canonical. "With the End of Life of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in April 2019, and to support the planning efforts of developers worldwide, Canonical is announcing the availability of ESM for Ubuntu 14.04."

ESM provided more than 60 critical security updates to users

In more than a year since it was first announced, Canonical's ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) program has provided more than 120 critical security updates to users who bought the commercial package for their Ubuntu 12.04 installations. To name a few of the major ones, we can mention Spectre, Meltdown, SegmentSmack, FragmentSmack, Dirty Cow, Stack Clash, Foreshadow, Blueborne, and GDPR.

Organizations interested in keeping their Ubuntu 14.04 infrastructures up to date can check out the Canonical’s commercial support package Ubuntu Advantage or contact Canonical's sales team to start planning for the upcoming end of life scheduled for April 30, 2019. If you don't want to purchase the ESM package, you are free to upgrade your Ubuntu 14.04 LTS infrastructure to either Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), which will be supported until April 2021 and April 2023 respectively.