In a few short weeks, Ubuntu Studio 20.04 LTS will reach the end of its three years of supported life provided by the Ubuntu Studio team. All users are urged to upgrade to 22.04 LTS at this time.

This means that the Xfce, audio, video, graphics, photography, and publishing components of your system will no longer receive updates, plus we at Ubuntu Studio won’t support it after 28-April-2023, though your base packages from Ubuntu will continue to receive security updates from Ubuntu until 2025 since Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Core continue to receive updates.

Unfortunately, due to the change in desktop environment from Xfce to KDE’s Plasma Desktop, there is no supported in-place upgrade path. The only supported upgrade path is to back-up your /home/{user} folder and reinstall the operating system.

No single release of any operating system can be supported indefinitely, and Ubuntu Studio has no exception to this rule.

Long-Term Support releases are identified by an even numbered year-of-release and a month-of-release of April (04). Hence, the most recent Long-Term Support release is 22.04 (YY.MM = 2022.April), and the next Long-Term Support release will be 24.04 (2024.April). LTS releases for official Ubuntu flavors (not Desktop or Server which are supported for five years) are three years, meaning LTS users are expected to upgrade after every LTS release with a one year buffer.