Lifetime

During the lifetime of a release you will receive:

• security updates for all included packages
• critical bugfix updates (usually these are found & fixed in the first few months of its lifetime)

A discontinuation announcement will be sent to the opensuse-security-announce and opensuse-announce mailing lists some time before.

Supported distributions

The following distributions are expected to receive updates until the specified date:

• openSUSE 12.1 - May 15th 2013 which is in -1508 days (2 months after release of 12.3)
• openSUSE 11.4 - September 15th 2012 which is in -1750 days (2 months after release of 12.2)
• openSUSE 11.3 - January 16th 2012 which is in -1993 days (2 months after release of 12.1)

Discontinued distributions

Users running a (soon-to-be) discontinued version of openSUSE should upgrade their systems to a supported release to receive security updates and community support. Since eventually package repositories for discontinued releases are be removed from download servers as well as the build target list of the Build Service it will be increasingly difficult to install new software on such distributions.

The following distributions have reached their end of life and should not be used anymore:

• openSUSE 11.2 - May 12th 2011 (done) Note: The Evergreen community effort is going to continue the openSUSE 11.2 maintenance similar to 11.1
• openSUSE 11.1 - January 14th 2011 (done) Note: Project Evergreen aims to provide long term support for openSUSE 11.1.
• openSUSE 11.0 - July 26th, 2010 (done)
• openSUSE 10.3 - October 31st 2009 (done)
• openSUSE 10.2 - November 30th 2008 (done)
• SUSE Linux 10.1 - May 31st 2008 (done)
• SUSE Linux 10.0 - November 30st 2007 (done)
• SUSE Linux 9.3 - April 30th 2007 (done)
• SUSE Linux 9.2 - October 31st 2006 (done)
• SUSE Linux 9.1 - June 30th 2006 (done)

openSUSE versions up to and including 11.1 had a lifetime of 2 years.

Prolonged Support

There is a list of mirrors that still offer downloading of discontinued releases.

The Evergreen project is a community effort for continued support of openSUSE 11.1 and 11.2.

SUSE Linux Enterprise products

The lifetime of the Enterprise products is listed on the authoritative novell.com page.

Customers are able to receive support, security and maintenance updates for these products, see the Novell Lifecycle page for full details.