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Ubuntu Pro subscription - should you pay to use Linux?
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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Ubuntu Pro gives you 5 more years of security updates for versions that are EoL. You can see it here if you scroll down to the maintenance schedule https://ubuntu.com/security/esm
Glad to hear it's extended maintenance for old software and not making their private users less secure.
Unfortunately, it's both. They also hold back security updates for non-latest releases that are still covered under Standard support. I work in an environment where we track new CVEs for our builds, and we constantly see vulnerabilities for 22.04 that are fixed in Pro but not made available otherwise.
Sure, technically you can opt into Pro as an individual user without paying, but it puts everyone who uses off the shelf installs and containers at risk and is therefore an immoral and unethical process in my opinion.
Pro involves Canonical making unilateral updates to certain packages, while the main universe relies on the package’s maintainers to make updates available. Unless you were to want Canonical to take over development of every bit of linux software, I don’t see how they could improve this.
I take it your build is dependant on the community-maintained Universe repo?
https://ubuntu.com/security/cves/about#security
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1452497/what-are-esm-apps-and-how-do-they-relate-to-ubuntu-pro
If they already to the work for esm-apps repo then they could at least send those fixes over to the universe repo until the release version is EoL one would think. On the other hand I have no idea what lives in universe and what lives in main.
That was a rabbit hole.
What about 25.10?
That one is not LTS, you'll want to update to 26.04 sooner rather than later.
yea I would say that's what home users should be doing anyways? idk to me it doesn't make sense to be so far behind on updates when the non-LTS is available