The official support period for Ubuntu 13.04 will end later this month.
From January 27 the ‘Raring Ringtail’, released back in April of last year, will receive no further security updates, bug fixes or package upgrades from the main Ubuntu repositories.
In an effort “to save time, money and [developer] effort” – all of which are needed to ensure Ubuntu’s convergent goal can be reached as soon as possible – Ubuntu 13.04 was the first release to adopt a newer, far shorter support window of just nine months.
Prior to the decision, which was made back in March of last year, Canonical graced non-Long Term Support (LTS) versions of Ubuntu with eighteen months of security, package and bug fixes.
All is not lost for those rocking out with the peppy bushy-tailed Racoon: Ubuntu 13.10 is available as direct upgrade (using the Software Updater tool) to all 13.04 users and is supported until July 2014.
A great stop-gap before the next LTS release, Ubuntu 14.04, arrives in April. Named the ‘Trusty Tahr’, it will offer a far longer support period of five years on the desktop and server.