Debian announced the completion of the District of the District DEBIAN 11 “Bullseye”, which was released three years ago. Updates with the elimination of vulnerabilities for Debian 11 will be produced as part of expanded support programs (LTS), lasting until August 31, 2026. Full-time support for the current DEBIAN 12 branch will last until June 10, 2026, after which LTS reinforcements will be provided for this branch until June 30, 2028.
A separate group of developers called the LTS Team, consisting of enthusiasts and company representatives interested in long-term Debian supplies, will release updates for LTS-testing. The LTS Team will take over from the Debian Security Team and continue to support Debian 11 without interruption. Updates will only be produced for architectures i386, AMD64, ARM64, and ARMHF.
Some packages like Web applications will not receive long-term support, as it may not be feasible to support them for 5 years. Users are recommended to use backports. Among the unsupported packages are Chromium, Consul, Xen, Tor, PHPPGADMIN, PDNS-ReCursor, Salt, Snort, Slurm-WLM, Libreswan, GPAC, as well as all packages from the Games section. Users can check for unsupported packages using the Check-Support-STATUS utility from DEBIAN-SECURITY-Support.
After the end of LTS support for Debian 11, the extended LTS program will be available. Freexian plans to release updates until 2031 to eliminate vulnerabilities in a limited set of packages for AMD64, Armel, and i386 architectures. Updates for extended LTS are distributed through the external repository supported by Freexian. Access is free for everyone, and the range of supported packages depends on the total number of sponsors and their interests.
Previously, Debian support lasted around three years on average, depending on new release development activity. This short support time hindered enterprise adoption of Debian. With the introduction of LTS and Extended LTS initiatives, Debian’s support period has been extended to 10 years from the release date. Comparatively, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers 19 years of support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has 14 years (10 years + 4 years of additional paid service), Ubuntu provides 12 years (5 years + 7 years of additional paid service), OpenSUSE offers 18 months of support, and Fedora Linux has a support cycle of 13 months.