What is Ubuntu Server? LTS vs Interim Releases Explained

If you’ve just provisioned an unmanaged Ubuntu Server VPS, it’s worth understanding exactly what you’re running and why Ubuntu offers more than one type of release. Getting this right up front saves you from a nasty surprise a few months down the line when a release you didn’t realise was short-lived stops receiving security updates.

What is Ubuntu Server?

Ubuntu Server is the server edition of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution developed and maintained by Canonical Ltd, a UK-based company. It’s built on Debian, strips out the desktop environment and graphical extras you’d get with Ubuntu Desktop, and focuses on the packages and tooling you actually need to run services: SSH, web servers, databases, container runtimes, and so on.

Ubuntu is, by most measures, the most widely used Linux distribution on servers and in the cloud. That popularity matters practically: it means a huge amount of documentation, community support, and third-party software is built and tested against Ubuntu first, which makes troubleshooting easier when something goes wrong.

Canonical funds Ubuntu’s development commercially, largely through Ubuntu Pro subscriptions and enterprise support contracts, while the distribution itself remains free and open source to install and use.

Two types of release: LTS and interim

Canonical publishes Ubuntu on a fixed schedule, but not every release is the same kind of release. There are two tracks, and mixing them up is one of the most common mistakes we see on new VPS deployments.

LTS (Long Term Support) releases

• Released every two years, in April, with even-numbered years (e.g. 24.04, 26.04).
• Get 5 years of standard security and maintenance updates from Canonical, free of charge.
• Can be extended to 10 years of coverage through a free Ubuntu Pro subscription, which is available at no cost for personal use and small numbers of machines. Coverage can be extended further still, to 15 years, via Canonical’s Legacy add-on – but that add-on is a separate paid extra, not something the free personal tier includes.
• Prioritise stability. Package versions are frozen at release and only receive bug fixes and security patches, not new features.

Interim releases

• Released every six months, in April and October (e.g. 25.10, 26.10).
• Supported for only 9 months from release.
• Ship newer kernel versions and newer package versions than the current LTS, useful if you need a specific feature that hasn’t landed in LTS yet.
• Require you to upgrade to the next release every 9 months to keep receiving security updates, with no long-term option.

Our honest recommendation

Run the current LTS release on your VPS. Almost every production server workload – web hosting, databases, mail, internal tools – is better served by 5 years of stability than by 9-month cycles of newer packages. An interim release means committing to upgrading roughly every 9 months just to stay patched, which is a maintenance burden most people running a single unmanaged VPS don’t want.

The only good reasons to choose an interim release are: you need a specific newer kernel or package version that genuinely isn’t available in the current LTS, and you’re prepared to treat upgrades as a recurring, non-optional task on your calendar. If that doesn’t sound like you, stick with LTS.

You can check what you’re running at any time with:

lsb_release -a

Once your server is up, one of the first things worth doing is setting up a non-root account with sudo privileges rather than working as root day to day – we cover that in How to Create a New Sudo User in Ubuntu.