Two versions of the popular Linux distributions Mandriva and SUSE will reach the end of life this month and in May, respectively. Mandriva 2007.0 will no longer be supported after 13th April, and will be removed from actively-supported mirror directories. SUSE Linux 10.1 will receive updates and bugfixes until May 30, 2008.

Marcus Meissner, the team lead of the SUSE Security Team, announced the discontinuing of SUSE Linux 10.1 on the opensuse-security-announce mailing list three days ago: SUSE Security announces that SUSE Linux 10.1 will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 10.1 after May 15th 2008 will not be fixed any more for this product. We expect to release the last updates around May 30th 2008."

He also added that users should not confuse SUSE Linux 10.1 with the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 family of Linux distributions, which follow different policies. Also, SUSE will continue to provide updates for openSUSE 10.2, 10.3 and 11.0 (still in development) for two years after the release of the respective distribution. The enterprise editions have a longer life span than openSUSE.

Mandriva 2007.0 will stop getting "desktop updates" on 13th this month. Applications like desktop environments, window managers, browsers etc. have an update life of 12 months, while software like the Linux kernel, Apache and other base components have 18 months of "base" updates. The offering of "base updates" for Mandriva 2007.0 will be stopped on October 13, 2008. But this can be changed, in case Mandriva decides to extend the updates support for some of the version of Mandriva Linux.

The first release of Mandriva - at that time Mandrake Linux - was based on Red Hat Linux 5.1 and used KDE 1.0 as desktop environment. It was launched 10 years ago, by MandrakeSoft, a company that is now merged in Mandriva.