Most (all?) of the official products have a statement of the expected production lifetime in tech specs or product brief. E.g.
Pi 4B product brief: "Raspberry Pi 4 Model B will remain in production until at least January 2034."
Pi 5 product brief: "Raspberry Pi 5 will remain in production until at least January 2036"
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases gives you the expected end of life dates for Debian. N.B. Debian is a community project, so it has no commercial or contractual obligations. I.e. the Debian developers can change their commitment to support if they want to. They are unlikely to prematurely pull the plug on a Debian release, because they want their project to be successful and have a good reputation. I'm just being honest about the actual support obligation for any free OS, Debian's popularity makes it quite likely that they will stick to their published dates unless they hit a major technical roadblock. There are people offering commercial (ELTS) support for Debian, for those who need more of a contractual commitment. There's also Ubuntu, where it's backed by Canonical as a commercial product, and you can buy both standard LTS support and ELTS support from them; or plenty of other Linux distros.
I've not seen an official support life statement for Raspberry Pi OS, but they can't realistically go significantly beyond Debian's dates, and it appears that they are currently fully supporting latest stable Debian, plus the previous one ("oldstable" in Debian terms), based on https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/. Keep in mind that they sell the hardware, but the OS is free, so their obligation is limited to keeping a good reputation with the community.
Pi 4B product brief: "Raspberry Pi 4 Model B will remain in production until at least January 2034."
Pi 5 product brief: "Raspberry Pi 5 will remain in production until at least January 2036"
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases gives you the expected end of life dates for Debian. N.B. Debian is a community project, so it has no commercial or contractual obligations. I.e. the Debian developers can change their commitment to support if they want to. They are unlikely to prematurely pull the plug on a Debian release, because they want their project to be successful and have a good reputation. I'm just being honest about the actual support obligation for any free OS, Debian's popularity makes it quite likely that they will stick to their published dates unless they hit a major technical roadblock. There are people offering commercial (ELTS) support for Debian, for those who need more of a contractual commitment. There's also Ubuntu, where it's backed by Canonical as a commercial product, and you can buy both standard LTS support and ELTS support from them; or plenty of other Linux distros.
I've not seen an official support life statement for Raspberry Pi OS, but they can't realistically go significantly beyond Debian's dates, and it appears that they are currently fully supporting latest stable Debian, plus the previous one ("oldstable" in Debian terms), based on https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/. Keep in mind that they sell the hardware, but the OS is free, so their obligation is limited to keeping a good reputation with the community.
Statistics: Posted by Murph9000 — Wed Sep 04, 2024 12:58 am