Ubuntu LTS maintenance releases 16.04.7 and 18.04.5 available

Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu maintenance releases 16.04.7 and 18.04.5, which correspond to the penultimate and penultimate LTS versions of this popular operating system.

As is often the case with LTS maintenance releases, what stands out is the accumulation of patches that improve system reliability and save a long and tedious first-boot upgrade process. In Ubuntu 18.04.5 the patches accumulated from the previous maintenance release have been applied and the desktop edition support has been updated so that it can work on newer hardware configurations. For its part, the Server edition continues to use an old kernel by default, but from now on it can be easily changed to a newer HWE.

For its part, Ubuntu 16.04.7 does not seem to include any improvement in terms of hardware support, but it does include all the security patches and against software bugs accumulated since the previous maintenance release. An important point is that the flavors of the Canonical distribution only have three years of support, while the Desktop (with GNOME), Server, Cloud, and Kylin editions have five years.

As our readers will know, we are talking about the LTS versions prior to the current one. Ubuntu 18.04 is still sane, although the flavors will officially run out of support next year. For its part, regular support for Ubuntu 16.04 ends in 2021, so users who continue to stick to that version should at least start planning where to go so as not to use an unsupported system when it has come to an end. cycle, posing a serious safety risk.

We close by saying that both Ubuntu 16.04.7 and 18.04.5 include the patches against BootHole, the critical vulnerability discovered in GRUB that in the end, and despite its severity has not been so bad because it requires to write access to the configuration file of the bootloader.

Ubuntu 18.04.5 download

• Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS desktop and server
• Kubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
• Ubuntu MATE 18.04.5 LTS
• Ubuntu Budgie 18.04.5 LTS
• Xubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
• Lubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
• Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS Netboot

Download Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS

• Ubuntu Desktop and Server 16.04.7 LTS
• Ubuntu Cloud 16.04.7 LTS
• Ubuntu Kylin 16.04.7 LTS