Businesses can now purchase the ESM package

May 6, 2019 12:53 GMT  ·  By

Canonical announced that the Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) operating system series has reached end of life and it will no longer be supported unless you purchase a commercial offering called ESM (Extended Security Maintenance).

Released on April 17th, 2014, the Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) was an LTS (Long Term Support) version supported with security and software updates, as well as regular maintenance releases (the last one being Ubuntu 14.04.6, released on March 5th, 2019) for a total of five years, until April 25th, 2019, when Canonical announced the availability of the extended maintenance support.

"Ubuntu 14.04 LTS basic support has ended. No more package updates will be accepted to the 14.04 primary archive, and any subsequent support will be done via Extended Security Maintenance," said Adam Conrad in an email announcement. "Over the coming weeks, various images will be archived, and the primary archive will be copied to old-releases."

Users urged to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Now that Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) will no longer receive security patches, nor software updates, users can choose to either upgrade to a supported release, such as the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), or keep their Ubuntu 14.04 installations updated by purchasing the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) package from Canonical.

We encourage all Ubuntu 14.04 users to upgrade their systems to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release, which will be supported until April 2023. However, the upgrade is done in stages via the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release, which will be supported until April 2021. Upgrade instructions and caveats are provided by Canonical here and here. Please upgrade your installations as soon as possible or consider reinstalling.