Debian 8 LTS has officially reached the end of support

Jul 9, 2020 21:16 GMT  ·  By

If you’re still running Debian 8 on your device, you’d better update the system as soon as possible, as this particular release has officially reached the end of support.

Debian 8, also codenamed Jessie, is no longer supported as of June 30, 2020, which means that any computers still running it would no longer be provided with any security updates.

And it goes without saying that security updates are critical for the entire experience on Linux, so you should update to Debian 9 as soon as it goes live.

Debian 8 was released on April 26, 2015, and like all the other Debian LTS releases, it came with a total of five years of support. The deadline has now been reached, and the Debian team emphasizes it’s critical for everyone to update the operating system as soon as possible.

Next LTS release

Debian 9, also called Stretch, is projected to go live on July 18 for LTS devices.

“The LTS Team will prepare the transition to Debian 9 “Stretch,” which is the current oldstable release. The LTS Team has taken over support from the Security Team on July 6, 2020 while the final point update for stretch will be released on July 18, 2020m” the Debian team explains.

“Debian 9 will also receive Long Term Support for five years after its initial release with support ending on June 30, 2022. The supported architectures remain amd64, i386, armel and armhf. In addition we are pleased to announce, for the first time support will be extended to include the arm64 architecture.”

A product that’s no longer supported means it no longer receives security updates and other improvements. The lack of security updates should be a major concern for users and IT admins, especially a these would allow for malicious actors to find a way to break into people’s computers with even less effort and remain undetected for the whole time.