“One of the strange things about Canonical’s Long Term Support
(LTS) releases has always been the disparity between the length of
support on the desktop vs. the server. LTS releases today provide 5
yrs of support on the server and 3 on the desktop, but that’s going
to change with the 12.04 release.In contrast with other enterprise Linux vendors though,
Canonical still lags far behind in terms of support length. Both
Red Hat and SUSE offer as much as 10 years of support for their
enterprise releases. While 10 years is likely not necessary for
desktop support, it is for mission critical infrastructure, where
hardware refreshes are less frequent.