Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

Last year, Canonical increased its paid extended support lifespan to 12 years. Now, it's increasing it again, to 15 years ... for a price.

Canonical's announcement puts the main news right into the title: Canonical expands total coverage for Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on. This is an extended version of its existing Ubuntu Pro coverage.

The announcement links back to the lifetime increase that the company announced in March 2024, when it increased its extended support period from a decade to 12 years - as we reported at the time.

At the time, it meant that Ubuntu 14.04 got a life extension. Well, it just got another one: rather than croaking next year when 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" debuts, now, Trusty Tahr will live on until 2029 - and from now on, every Ubuntu LTS will have the same lifespan.

The extension applies to Canonical's Expanded Security Maintenance program. This means that, if Ubuntu Pro customers add nominated LTS boxes to their account, they will continue to get critical security updates for another decade after the end of the normal five-year LTS period.

It's not an exact like-for-like comparison, but it looks like it stands up favorably to Red Hat's and SUSE's extended support offerings.

RHEL gets a standard five-year lifespan of Full Support with all components updated, then another five years of Maintenance Support with critical updates. After that, there are three more years of Extended Life when customers get help but not updates, unless they pay for an Extended Update Support Add-on, which lasts two more years. So, that's 12 years, if you pay for the extension.

At SUSECon in June 2024, SUSE raised the stakes to 13 years, and that's still its LTSS offering now:

With this latest extension, it looks like Canonical has the longest support lifespan in the Linux business. In theory, if you pay for it, next year's 26.04 LTS will be supported all the way out to 2041. ®