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I read that support for Debian 6 ended this month. And here I read that there is LTS until 2016.

https://www.debian.org/News/2014/20140424

Is this for paying customers only? Or can we safely keep using Debian 6?

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    This is the first time they have provided something like an LTS. We may need to wait and see how the long term team performs. At this point nobody can say if security/critical patches will actually get processed promptly. The new team claims they will do this, but will they succeed? Only time will tell.
    – Zoredache
    May 14, 2014 at 19:19
  • I have a Debian 6 server and see updates coming by regularly. That doesn't say anything about the quality of the updates, and if security problems are fixed in time though. That's no reason to doubt their work however. I'm in doubt whether to update now or to wait til Debian 8 is here in November.
    – SPRBRN
    May 15, 2014 at 8:01
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    I think you need to re-read that link. You see updates coming regularly right now, because Debian 6 was being covered by the official security team. The LTS support is being handled by a completely different group of people. Before this announcement the expectation was that the official security team would only maintain squeeze for one year after wheezy was released (May 2013). This new team has handling the LTS support basically been on the job for a couple weeks. It is kind of difficult to have a huge amount of trust in something that is basically brand new.
    – Zoredache
    May 15, 2014 at 8:15
  • As for when to update. Debian has never supported updating skipping major version in an 'upgrade'. So don't plan on going directly from 6.x -> 8.x unless you are also planning on doing a clean install.
    – Zoredache
    May 15, 2014 at 8:16

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Debian do not have 'paying customers' as such.

You can safely keep using Debian 6, however only i386 and amd64 architectures will be receiving the long term support.

Additionally, the long term support is not handled by an official Debian team, so the paperwork may not be handled as well as if it were an official Debian release.

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  • I know Debian is free and has no organisation like Red Hat that offers paid professional support for companies. So if I understand correctly, all updates are publicly available via apt-get?!
    – SPRBRN
    May 14, 2014 at 11:59
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    Indeed, you understand correctly. The only issue that may come up ( off the top of my head ) is ensuring that the mirrors you're using keep getting the updates for squeeze.
    – Lawrence
    May 14, 2014 at 13:58

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