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Yes, Ubuntu Is Withholding Security Patches for Some Software
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No. All the official packages in the
main
repo get security updates from the Debian security team.Only the packages in
contrib
,non-free
andnon-free-firmware
don't have official security updates and rely on the package maintainers. These are not considered part of the Debian distro, and I don't even have them enabled on my servers.Out-of-the-box, Debian only enables the
main
repo, plus thenon-free-firmware
one if any of your devices require it (e.g. Nvidia graphics, Realtek Bluetooth, etc). You have to manually enablecontrib
andnon-free
, and by doing that, it's assumed you know what you're doing.In the case of
non-free
andnon-free-firmware
, they can be closed source software (like the Nvidia drivers) or have a non-open-source license that doesn't allow distributing modified versions. In those cases, the Debian team is unable to patch them even if they wanted to.