As of 30 April 2021 Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS has reached EOS (End of Support). There will be no more updates or security patches for the Budgie specific components for this release.
Being a long term release (LTS), official Ubuntu flavors are only supported for 3 years , as opposed to Ubuntu’s 5 years. Whilst Budgie components of your system will no longer receive updates after 30th April, foundational components will continue to receive security updates from Ubuntu.
Please note that there is no upgrade path for i386 (32bit) systems.
So practically what does this mean to me?
Packages such as Firefox and Libreoffice will continue to get updates since they are maintained by Canonical.
Support via discourse here & Ask Ubuntu will cease. Expect standard replies of “Please upgrade to 20.04”.
In addition - if any updates from Canonical break any Budgie components then you will need to resolve matters yourself. Canonical will not resolve end-of-support software issues.
So why don’t you support Ubuntu Budgie for 5 years?
UB is a community distribution - it depends upon dedicated volunteers to resolve issues, testing and continue development. Five years is a long-long time in software terms - finding volunteers to run what is perceived to be ‘old-but-trustworthy’ rather than the shiniest version is very difficult.
Whilst we would love to support for the full five years we recognise we would need a couple of full-time engineers to enable this. We would need long-term corporate backing for this.
How do I check what release I am on?
See which version you are running by opening Settings and choose the About tab.
To check the support level of your system, run this command in the Terminal:
ubuntu-support-status
What should I do now?
We recommend upgrading to Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 LTS or later.
If you’re still running 18.04 LTS and are not ready to upgrade, don’t panic! The key foundations of the system (kernel and other packages in the ‘main’ repository) will still be as secure as the Ubuntu base until April 2023 , but please bear in mind some of your packages and applications will no longer receive updates.
To upgrade, open the Software Updater and follow the steps. Alternately, via Terminal:
sudo do-release-upgrade