Debian has officially announced the end of the maintenance period for the LTS branch of the Debian 11 “Bullseye” distribution, which was established in 2021. The updates for the LTS branch were provided by a dedicated group of developers known as the LTS Team, consisting of enthusiasts and representatives from companies committed to long-term support for Debian.
Following the conclusion of LTS support, the “Extended LTS” program will be managed by Freexian, offering Debian 11 updates for vulnerabilities in a select number of packages for the i386, amd64, armhf, and arm64 architectures until June 30, 2031. These updates will be available through an external repository maintained by Freexian, with access being free to all users. The list of supported packages will be determined by the number of sponsors and their specific interests.
In the past, the short and unpredictable support period for Debian, averaging around three years and dependent on new release development activity, hindered its adoption in enterprise environments. With the introduction of the LTS and Extended LTS programs, this barrier has been eliminated, extending Debian’s support timeframe to 10 years from the release date. By comparison, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers 19 years of maintenance, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides 14 years (10 years + 4 years of additional paid service), Ubuntu includes 12 years (5 years + 7 years of additional paid service), openSUSE offers 18 months, and Fedora Linux maintains support for 13 months.