Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series has officially transitioned to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM), effective May 31, 2023.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) continues its tradition of providing commercial support for Ubuntu LTS releases in the form of Extended Security Maintenance (ESM), which reaches the end of standard support after five years of maintenance. The Ubuntu 16.04 ESM product will end support in April 2024.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was released five years ago, on April 26, 2018, and will now be supported by Canonical for five years through April 2028 with critical bug and security fixes through the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) package of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure.
Enterprises that rely on stability and are not yet able to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu LTS are encouraged to purchase an Ubuntu Pro subscription if they want to benefit from five years of support for their Bionic Beaver installation.
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.
“By subscribing to Ubuntu Pro, you can ensure that your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS deployment is fully supported through 2028. This extended support period provides ongoing assistance and maintenance for your workloads,” Canonical said.
Those who do not plan to purchase an Ubuntu Pro subscription are urged to upgrade their installations to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) as soon as possible, which brings an updated kernel with support for more devices, as well as many updated packages.
Canonical notes that the upgrade path from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support is through Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and then to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Users who are still running Ubuntu 18.04 after May 31, 2023 will not receive any security updates, meaning this installation will be at risk.
