Support for Ubuntu 11.04 – released 18 months ago today, on April 28, 2011 – officially ends today.
The ‘Natty Narwhal’ was, as all non-LTS releases are, provided with security and select bug-fixes for 18 months by Ubuntu and Canonical.
That support window is now over.
Unity’s Debut
11.04 was notable for a number of reasons. It was the first release of Ubuntu to come with the Unity desktop as default; Banshee became the default music player, and Libreoffice, having (at the time) been recently forked from OpenOffice, was made default office suite.
11.04 was also the first version of Ubuntu since 8.04 to not come with a separate netbook edition.
Upgrade
The main upgrade paths from 11.04 are, without re-installing, to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10, which is supported until April 2013 with ‘security updates and select high-impact bug fixes’.
Alternatively, a fresh upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 will give you support until April 2017.
Are you still using Ubuntu 11.04? What are you planning to do now official support has ended? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.