14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has just pulled the plug on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and the support period for this version of Ubuntu has officially ended.
Before Canonical decided to shorten the support period to nine months, all the intermediary Ubuntu distributions (non-LTS) benefited from an 18 months of support.
The users might notice an interesting fact. Ubuntu 13.04, which arrived six months after Ubuntu 12.10 has already reached end of life, leaving Ubuntu 13.10 to fill the void. Unfortunately, the 13.10 branch will also reach end of life in a couple of months, which means that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is now the desired update for anyone.
“Since changes to the Ubuntu support cycle mean that Ubuntu 13.04 has reached end of life before Ubuntu 12.10, the support cycle for Ubuntu 12.10 has been extended slightly to overlap with the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This will allow users to move directly from Ubuntu 12.10 to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (via Ubuntu 13.10). This period of overlap is now coming to a close, and we will be retiring Ubuntu 12.10 on Friday, May 16,” said Canonical’s José Antonio Rey in the original announcement.
The best alternative is to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which will be supported until 2019. To be fair, nothing can stop users from running Ubuntu 12.10 from now on, but they just won't receive any security updates past the May 16 date.