Debian (debian-gnu-linux) End of Life

Debian's support has three stages, each run by a different party — and who maintains a release matters operationally.

Regular security support comes from the Debian Security Team and lasts about three years, until roughly a year after the next stable release. The Debian LTS Team then continues free security updates to five years from release. ELTS extends that to ten years.

ELTS is not part of the Debian project. The official wiki states plainly that "it is not an official Debian project", and Debian's package building infrastructure is not involved. It is run by Freexian as a commercial service, and the set of supported packages is determined by the organisations that subscribe. Treating "Debian is supported for ten years" as automatic will leave systems without updates after five.

LTS has its own caveat: unlike regular security support, it covers a limited set of architectures (currently i386, amd64, armhf and arm64). Systems on other architectures fall out of support when a release enters LTS.

The "End of Life" column on this site is the end of LTS — the last day free updates are available. The "Extended Support" column is commercial ELTS.

Debian releases are usually referred to by codename (trixie, bookworm, bullseye) rather than version number; check VERSION_CODENAME in /etc/os-release.