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Canonical informs us today that the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series has officially transitioned to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) effective immediately on May 31st, 2023.
Continuing its tradition to offer commercial support in the form of Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) for Ubuntu LTS releases that reach the end of standard support after five years of maintenance, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) now joins the Ubuntu 16.04 ESM offering, which will end on April 2024.
Released five years ago, on April 26th, 2018, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will now be supported by Canonical with critical bug and security fixes for five more years, until April 2028, through the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) package of the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure and Applications offering.
Businesses that rely on stability and are not yet able to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu LTS release, are recommended to purchase the Ubuntu Pro subscription if they want to benefit from five more years of support for their Bionic Beaver installations.
Ubuntu Pro is available for amd64, arm64, s390X, and PowerPC architectures for desktops, servers, IoT devices, public clouds on AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud platforms. More details about Extended Security Maintenance are available here.
Those who don’t want to purchase an Ubuntu Pro subscription are urged to upgrade their installations as soon as possible to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), which brings a newer kernel that supports more devices, as well as numerous updated packages compared to those available in Ubuntu 18.04.
Canonical notes the fact that the supported upgrade path from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is via Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and then to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Instructions and caveats for the upgrades may be found here and here.
Those of you still running Ubuntu 18.04 after May 31st, 2023, will not receive any security updates. This means that your installations will soon be open to hackers and offer the potential of a major breach, so it is important to take action and upgrade as soon as possible.
Last updated 11 months ago
