Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will reach the end of its standard support on May 29, 2025. At that time, users will either have to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, or enable Extended Security Maintenance. Ideally, you should open up the Update Manager and use the upgrade option to go to a newer version, but some may have specific needs on 20.04, so ESM will be needed in those cases.
Enabling ESM on a personal machine is free of cost, but it does require you to set a few things up. First, head to the subscribe page and choose ‘Myself’; this will allow you to enroll five devices in Ubuntu Pro to keep getting updates. Once you’ve registered, you’ll then need to enter some commands into the terminal.
Before you can enable ESM, you need to attach your Ubuntu install to Ubuntu Pro. You should go to your Ubuntu Pro dashboard after registering and then look for the command where your personal token:
sudo pro attach
You will see that your terminal enables each of the services related to ESM after applying this command.
Next, you need to ensure that the ubuntu-advantage-tools package is installed. This should already be installed, but just to make sure, run the following command, which will update your repositories and install the package if needed:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install ubuntu-advantage-tools
Now you’ll want to check the status of your ESM services with this command:
sudo pro status
You will want to see if esm-apps and esm-infra are enabled. To enable esm-infra use this command:
sudo pro enable esm-infra
And for esm-apps, use:
sudo pro enable esm-apps
Now update your package list after those have been enabled:
sudo apt update
Then apply any available updates with:
sudo apt upgrade
If you ever want to detach a computer from your account, just enter:
sudo pro detach
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is an extremely old version of Ubuntu. It was first released on March 23, 2020 - over five years ago. For those with a good memory, that was around the time that countries were starting to implement lockdowns against COVID-19. When Ubuntu 20.04 was released, the world was also two and a half years away from using the first iteration of ChatGPT, and we’ve had many improvements since then. If you’re still on Ubuntu 20.04, it’s really time to upgrade, but if you have a weird bit of software that only works on 20.04, then you can enable the ESM support.
Source: Ubuntu
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