Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS will be supported for three years — up from the two originally planned.

As we reported on earlier this month, the Ubuntu GNOME development team were seeking to gain official LTS status for its upcoming release for a period of two years and three months. This would cover users with essential updates from April this year until April 2016, the time of the next Ubuntu LTS release.

But this timeframe wasn’t considered suitable by Canonical’s Steve Langasek. As a member of the Technical Board that oversees, among other things, whether an Ubuntu-based flavour can be granted official LTS status, ‘concern’ was expressed over the shortness of the support period put forward by Ubuntu GNOME, explaining:

“…Our policy has been to not recommend (or advertise in the UI) LTS upgrades until the first point release, this effectively gives users zero margin between the dropping of security support for Ubuntu-GNOME 14.04, and the first upgrades to Ubuntu-GNOME 16.04.”

Continuing, Langasek goes on to say that he ‘would not be comfortable‘ in endorsing the spin for LTS status should it not offer its users ‘a reasonable overlap between the LTS support periods.’

”I think we should regard 3 years of support as the minimum for LTS status.”

Result

Tim Lunn, technical lead of the Ubuntu GNOME project, has agreed to extend the proposed support window to cover that required by Canonical. As a result Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 users can look forward to 3 years of support and security updates for core system and GNOME packages.

The distro joins Xubuntu and Lubuntu in opting to become long term support releases.