Server OS Support#

This page lists our up to date information regarding support of the server operating systems for version 3.x of the VPN server.

We currently ONLY support the amd64/x86_64 architecture. We MAY support arm64/aarch64 in the future if there is demand for it.

In the Release Notes we wrote that we support operating systems until as much as one year after the release of the next version set to replace it. We’ll elaborate more on this in the next sections and provide exact dates when the support ends.

We’ll add upgrade instructions to the sections below as soon as new versions of the operating system become available.

We did not yet decide on an EOL date for version 3.x of the VPN server itself, when this changes we’ll update the dates in the tables below accordingly. We only talk about the operating system versions and their EOL.

Note, that this is what we’ll support, not what is necessarily smart to do! Please consider upgrading to the latest release of the OS as soon as it is considered safe, for example after the first point release. As an example: if you are running on Debian 11, you upgrade to Debian 12 after 12.1 has been released.

Debian#

We’ll support Debian releases a little bit longer than 1 year after the release of its successor to make it exactly match the Debian project’s EOL date.

We do realize that Debian has LTS support, which provides security updates after the official EOL of Debian. However, we consider it unwise to keep using Debian releases after the Debian Security Team no longer supports them, especially since we are providing security software.

• Upgrade Debian 11 to Debian 12

Ubuntu#

We consider the lifetime of Ubuntu releases too long to support during their whole LTS lifetime, this means we’ll follow our 1 year after the next release plan. So, effectively you’ll have to upgrade within one (1) year of the release of the next LTS version. For example, we recommend to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 as soon as 24.04.1 becomes available, which is currently scheduled for 2024-08-15.

Enterprise Linux#

We currently support 3 EL 9 “flavors”, we went a bit overboard perhaps:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
• AlmaLinux 9
• Rocky Linux 9

For now we’ll support all of them in exactly the same way. If they start to deviate from each other, or do no longer satisfy our requirements for support, e.g. they start to lack behind with security fixes, we MAY decide to drop support for a particular flavor.

Based on our experience and observations, we would recommend to run either on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or AlmaLinux.

We currently do not know exactly when EL 10 will be released, it is expected around May 2025. That means, we can’t be sure until when we’ll support EL 9, but it will be at most until 1 year after the release of EL 10.

Fedora Linux#

The Fedora EOL policy:

Fedora provides approximately 13 months of support for each release. The N-2 release reaches End of Life four weeks after Fedora Linux N is released.

We’ll follow the Fedora project’s EOL times for the VPN server exactly, so we’ll support Fedora releases for the exact amount of their lifetime.

Sources#

• Debian Releases
• Debian LTS
• Ubuntu Release Cycle
• Noble Numbat Release Schedule
• Fedora Linux Releases
• Fedora End of Life Releases
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle