In a statement issued this morning on the company's blog, Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported for five years on the desktop instead of the usual three years that a standard long-term support release gets. The company says that the longer duration of desktop support is intended to better serve corporate desktop rollouts.

New versions of the Ubuntu Linux distribution are released on a time-based six-month cycle. Every two years, Ubuntu gets a special long-term support (LTS) release that is maintained for three years on the desktop and five years on servers. During the support period, Canonical provides security patches and other relevant updates. The move to offer five years of support on both the desktop and the server in version 12.04 is a significant change.

The predictability and long duration of update availability for the LTS releases have played a major role in making Ubuntu a practical server operating system. Canonical's statement says that approximately 70 percent of all Ubuntu server deployments use an LTS version.

Canonical hopes that extending LTS desktop support to five years will help encourage broader adoption of the operating system in enterprise environments, where the hardware refresh cycle for workstations can often be more than three years. The company's statement cites Qualcomm and the city of Munich as examples of organizations that have conducted large-scale Ubuntu desktop rollouts.