What’s the difference between a Long Term Support Release and a Normal Release?
Tags: ubuntu, ltsreleasemanagement
Published: 2021-11-24 17:12:30

---
title: What’s the difference between a Long Term Support Release and a Normal Release?
published: true
date: 2021-11-23 16:02:49 UTC
tags: Ubuntu,ltsreleasemanagement
canonical_url: https://stackallflow.com/ubuntu/whats-the-difference-between-a-long-term-support-release-and-a-normal-release/
---

<header>
<p><span style="font-size: 1.2em; color: initial;">lts</span><span style="font-size: 1.2em; color: initial;">release-management</span></p>
</header>

What are the differences between an Ubuntu Long Term Support release (LTS) and a normal release?

#### Accepted Answer

There is a new release every 6 months (in April and October), with the version number being _year.month_ (e.g.: 16.04 was released in April 2016). Every two years, the April release is a Long Term Support version.

- All **normal releases** (13.04 and later) are only supported for **9 months**.
- All **LTS releases** (12.04 and later) are supported for **five years** on both the desktop and the server.  
<sub>Older versions had slightly different support cycles, but they haven’t been included as they’re all unsupported now. See the <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases" rel="noreferrer nofollow external noopener" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank">Ubuntu Wiki<span></span></a> for historical information.</sub>

Now, support means:

- Updates for potential security problems and bugs (not new versions of software)
- Availability of Commercial support contracts from Canonical
- Support by Landscape, Canonical’s enterprise oriented server management tool set

**The _Desktop_** refers to the packages that are in the **main** and **restricted** repositories, these are the ones that have the little Ubuntu icon next to them in Synaptic or are marked as Supported in the Software-Centre respectively.

**The _Server_** packages are the ones in the “server-ship” and “supported-common” _seeds_ (there’s a [directory of all of the different seeds](http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/germinate-output/) available).

This is what this looks like:

[![Image depicting](https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/ac31b45e-release-chart-desktop-big.png)](https://assets.ubuntu.com/v1/ac31b45e-release-chart-desktop-big.png)

<sub>Image from <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life" rel="noreferrer nofollow external noopener" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank">Ubuntu.com<span></span></a></sub>

The primary reason for using an LTS release is that you can **depend on it** being updated regularly and therefore secure and stable.

As if this wasn’t enough, Ubuntu releases additional versions of the last LTS between releases—such as **14.04.1** , that incorporate all of the updates up to this point. This is called a Point-Release (or sometimes _snapshot_). Those are released every quarter to half year, as needed.

In addition to support, there are Development strategies that differentiate an LTS release:

- The _base_ of the operating system, Debian, comes in three versions: Stable, Testing and Unstable. Normally, Ubuntu is based on Unstable; the LTS releases are based on Testing. [Starting with 14.04 LTS](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS), all new releases will be based on Debian _Unstable_.
- The Development effort for an LTS release in focused on providing a _rock solid_ base, not only for customers who want the LTS release, but also for the next three Ubuntu versions to come.

* * *

Thanks to Oli for demystifying that last part, I wasn’t quite sure about it.

The post [What’s the difference between a Long Term Support Release and a Normal Release?](https://stackallflow.com/ubuntu/whats-the-difference-between-a-long-term-support-release-and-a-normal-release/) appeared first on [Stack All Flow](https://stackallflow.com).