Ishani Ghoshal
on 21 November 2024
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS end of life: standard support is coming to an end. Here’s how to prepare.
In 2025, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) will reach the end of its standard five-year support window. It’s time to start thinking about your options for upgrading.
What is an Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) release?
Ubuntu long-term support releases (LTS) are released every 2 years by Canonical. Canonical provides patching and maintenance for Ubuntu LTS releases for 5 years for all packages in the main repository. For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, this support will last until April 2025. After this, you have two options.
The first is to upgrade to the latest LTS release, Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat), which will be supported until 2029.
The second is to obtain Expanded Security Maintenance and extend the support period for 20.04 LTS until April 2030 with an Ubuntu Pro subscription. An additional 2 years can be purchased with the Legacy Support add-on, extending the total security maintenance period until April 2032. This helps you ensure your systems remain operational and compliant, with minimal impact to business continuity.
With an Ubuntu Pro subscription, Canonical provides security maintenance for the main packages and universe packages, while giving you additional time to prepare for an upgrade, freeing up your teams to focus on business-as-usual activities. Canonical offers a 30-day trial for enterprises. Ubuntu Pro is always free for personal use.
What’s Ubuntu Pro?
Ubuntu Pro is a subscription that provides Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) on top of every Ubuntu LTS.
Ubuntu Pro is available for amd64, arm64, s390X, and PowerPC architectures and includes security patching for all Ubuntu packages through Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) for both infrastructure and applications, with an option to add 24/7 phone and ticket support.
Ubuntu Pro is free for personal and small-scale commercial use on up to 5 machines. For enterprises, we offer transparent, per-machine pricing for desktops, servers, IoT devices, and for VMs on public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Oracle.
What is ESM?
ESM stands for Expanded Security Maintenance. ESM is included in Ubuntu Pro, and covers 2 kinds of packages: infrastructure (esm-infra) and applications (esm-apps).
Esm-infra covers all packages in the Ubuntu main repository.
The main repository contains 2,300 packages that are installed on most machines or are widely popular across a range of deployments, from desktops to clouds.
Esm-apps covers all packages in the Ubuntu universe and main repository, which amounts to over 253,000 packages.
The universe repository includes all packages from Ubuntu, the Ubuntu community, and Debian. For the packages in universe, we provide security support with a focus on delivering patches for high and critical vulnerabilities, backed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Our commitment is to address these severe issues promptly to ensure system stability and security.
With Legacy Support, the support period for both esm-infra and esm-apps expands to 12 years.
Why choose ESM?
Missed deadlines. Endless troubleshooting. Compatibility issues. If you’re not ready to upgrade to a new LTS, opting for ESM provides you with the time needed to balance preparation with business as usual. This is even more salient if you’re in a heavily regulated industry, where compliance requirements like PCI-DSS, SOC2, or GDPR add more complexity to the process.
With Ubuntu Pro, you can extend the life of your current setup without the pressure to upgrade immediately.
What to do next?
It is crucial to plan out your next steps. Running Ubuntu 20.04 without ESM would mean you no longer receive security updates after April 2025. Unpatched CVEs could expose your systems to security breaches.
For those in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, or telecommunications, applying security patches on time is essential to meet compliance standards. If you’re using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, it’s time to consider your next step: upgrade to the latest Ubuntu LTS or get ESM coverage through Ubuntu Pro until 2032.
