What is this about?#

For a few tests, I set up two Virtual Private Servers (VPS) at OVHcloud. The performance was excellent. What surprised me, though, was that Ubuntu 25.04 is already EOL (end-of-life), while Ubuntu 25.10, which has been available for months, is still not offered.

In general, using an unsupported version is obviously not something I would recommend. So after each test, the first thing to do was sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y.

When I asked OVHcloud support about this, I got the following surprising reply:

We are fully aware of that situation some of our customers are still wants to use deprecated version of ubuntu.

I replied that this is also a security issue and that they should at least offer the current version as well, instead of only the outdated one.

Of course, anyone can alternatively install Ubuntu 24.04 or Ubuntu 22.04. Those releases are still officially supported by Ubuntu until 2029 and 2027 respectively.

The list of available images can be seen here ↗. Still, that page sets the expectations:

OVHcloud Linux releases can have a couple of weeks of delay compared to distribution releases.

and

After its initial release, OVHcloud provided images for a given release version remain available until the end-of-life defined by the editor/community or the end of support if no specific end-of-life is defined. After that, it cannot be installed/reinstalled anymore. We strongly advise customers to upgrade existing machines with an OS version supported by the editor/community, and refer to the specific Terms and Conditions of their OS regarding upgrades when they apply.

But neither is actually practiced.

Timeline#