Debian 10 has reached the end of its life
Debian 10 (Buster) has reached the end-of-lifecycle. With immediate effect, Debian will no longer provide security updates for it.
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The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) team has announced the end of support for Debian 10, also known as "Buster". The long-term support expired on June 30. The distribution was released in July 2019 and is now five years old.
This means that the old distribution will no longer receive security updates. Anyone still using Buster should either migrate to a newer version or take the "Extended Long Term Support" option. The LTS team is now taking the "oldstable" version "Bullseye", Debian 11, under its wing. This will also be supported for five years and will cease to be supported from August 31, 2026.
Debian: standardized lifecycle
In order to make the Debian lifecycle easier to follow, the security, release and LTS teams have agreed to provide three years of regular support followed by two years of long-term support. The LTS team will therefore take over Bullseye support from August 14 this year. The processor architectures amd64, i386, arm64 and armhf will be supported.
A website provides information on using Debian in LTS status. For example, there is a note there to convert the sources to the Bullseye repositories and to carry out a system upgrade after updating the sources in order to update from Debian 10 to 11. Before attempting this, however, it is essential to create a backup and plan for a downtime. During the procedure, scripts may no longer work or software may no longer run. The authors of the page therefore also link to the list of problems that can occur with Bullseye. In case of doubt, a clean reinstallation with the porting of the scripts and data used is the more sensible and cleaner option for moving to a Debian version that is still supported.
Commercial long-term support
However, there is also the commercially oriented Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) project. As part of this, there is support for some packages for a further five years, in the case of Buster until June 30, 2029. Debian points out that this is not an official Debian project.
The current version is Debian 12 with the code name "Bookwoorm". It was released around a year ago and brought improvements to firmware handling in particular and brought the distribution up to date with the more recent LTS kernel 6.1.
(dmk)