Recently, the Debian development team unveiled, through a statement, that full support for the Debian 11 "Bullseye" distribution, released three years ago, has come to an end. With this, from now on, security updates for Debian 11 will be provided through the LTS program (Long Term Support), which will be valid until August 31, 2026.
Regarding the current version, Debian 12, Standard support will be extended until June 10, 2026, and LTS updates for this version will continue until June 30, 2028.
It is worth mentioning that with the passage of Debian 11 "Bullseye" to the LTS stage, updates to this framework will be managed by the LTS Team, a dedicated group comprised of volunteers and companies interested in maintaining Debian security in the long term. This team will take over from the Debian security team to ensure continued support in Debian 11, focusing on the i386, amd64, arm64 and armhf architectures.
It is mentioned that extended support is not 100% guaranteed, as certain packages, like some applications, They are not viable to maintain for five years. To continue using these packages, it is recommended to use backports. Among the packages excluded from long-term support are, for example, web browsers, system administration tools, among others, in addition to all packages included in the "games" section.
Besides that, once LTS support for Debian 11 is finalized, it will be activated an extended support program called «Extended LTS»y Freexian will be in charge of offering updates security for a select set of packages on amd64, armel and i386 architectures, with plans to continue until 2031.
These updates They will be distributed through an external repository managed by Freexian, freely accessible to everyone. The number of packages supported in this program will depend on the number of sponsors and their specific interests.
Information for users
Bullseye LTS will be supported from August 15, 2024 to August 31, 2026.
Where possible, users are encouraged to update their machines to Debian 12, also known as Bookworm, the current stable version of Debian. To make the life cycle of Debian releases easier to remember, the related Debian teams have agreed on the following schedule: three years of regular support plus two years of long-term support. Debian 12 will therefore receive regular support until June 10, 2026 and long-term support until June 30, 2028, three and five years after the initial release, respectively.
Users who need to continue with Debian 11 can find relevant information about Debian long-term support at LTS/Using. Important information and changes related specifically to Bullseye LTS can be found at LTS/Bullseye.
It must be taken into account that in the past, the short and often due to the uncertain duration of the support for Debian, which I used to be about three years olds, this represented a significant obstacle to its adoption in enterprise environments. This was because the support life cycle depended on the pace of development of new versions.
However, With the introduction of the LTS and Extended LTS programs in Debian this problem has been solved, extending support for Debian up to a total of 10 years from its release. In comparison, other enterprise distributions offer different support durations: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides up to 19 years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers 14 years (10 years plus 4 years of additional paid support), Ubuntu goes up to 12 years (5 years plus 7 years of additional paid support), openSUSE is maintained for 18 months, and Fedora Linux has a 13-month cycle.
It is worth mentioning that if you want to identify packages that are not compatible on your system, you can use the check-support-status tool, which comes with the debian-security-support package.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, I invite you to consult the official Debian statement In the following link.