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Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Debian 13

Ubuntu 26.04 225 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon, was released on 23 April 2026, and its first point release, 26.04.1, followed on 27 August. As an LTS it carries five years of standard security maintenance, to May 2031, and five more through an Ubuntu Pro subscription, to May 2036. The previous two are still alive: 24.04 to May 2029 and 22.04 to May 2027. Between LTS releases Canonical ships an interim release every six months with only nine months of support: fine for laptops, bad for servers.

Debian 13 319 , codenamed Trixie, became stable on 9 August 2025; the current point release is 13.7 of 12 September 2026, a rollup of fixes already delivered through apt. Debian's security team supports a stable release for three years, to August 2028 here, and the LTS team then carries it to 30 June 2030. Debian 12 Bookworm made that handover on 12 July 2026 and runs under LTS to 30 June 2028.

Ubuntu ships newer versions of the stack; Debian installs less, changes less, and, with Alpine, is the base of the official PHP Docker 514 images. On a server you inherit, establish which one you are on first:

Identifying the distribution on a server you were handedShell
cat /etc/os-release      # NAME, VERSION_ID, VERSION_CODENAME and ID_LIKE
hostnamectl              # operating system, kernel, architecture, virtualization
uname -r                 # kernel release only
apt --version            # succeeds on Debian and Ubuntu; "command not found" elsewhere
Output
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION_ID="26.04"
VERSION="26.04.1 LTS (Resolute Raccoon)"
VERSION_CODENAME=resolute
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
...
  Virtualization: wsl
Operating System: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS
          Kernel: Linux 6.18.33.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2
    Architecture: x86-64
6.18.33.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2
apt 3.2.0 (amd64)

/etc/os-release is the one to trust: a standard, shell-parseable file on every modern distribution. Its ID_LIKE field names the family rather than the product (debian here, rhel centos fedora on Rocky Linux 11,029 and AlmaLinux 7,122 ), so a portable installer can choose between apt and dnf without hard-coding product names. The kernel line shows this machine is WSL2 6 : its kernel comes from Microsoft, not from the Ubuntu archive.