There are plenty of reasons to get rid of Ubuntu, but this isn’t one of them.
Before Ubuntu Pro, packages in universe (and multiverse) were not receiving (security) updates at all, unless someone from the community stepped up and maintained the package. Now Canonical provides security updates for universe, for the first time since Ubuntu has been introduced, via Ubuntu Pro, which is free for up to five personal devices and paid for all other use cases.
Debian is actually not that different (anymore). If you read the release notes of Debian 12, you’ll notice that quite a few package groups are excluded from guaranteed security updates, just like packages in universe are in Ubuntu. Unlike Ubuntu, Debian doesn’t split its package repository by security support though.
In both Debian and Ubuntu, only the main repo gets official security updates for free. Ubuntu has a paid option for universe whereas Debian doesn’t have that option and relies on the package maintainer to provide any updates.
I’d still recommend Debian over Ubuntu though, for various reasons.
Package maintainers can be slow to update packages though. Debian have a separate security team that get patches out ASAP, and those packages go into a separate security repo. I imagine Ubuntu does the same. It’s that security team that only deals with “official” packages, meaning anything that’s not in contrib, non-free, or non-free-firmware.
What you’re paying extra for are timely security updates for community-maintained packages that aren’t an official part of the OS. Debian doesn’t provide that for free either. Debian doesnt provide it at all since they don’t have any paid options.
No. All the official packages in the main repo get security updates from the Debian security team.
Only the packages in contrib, non-free and non-free-firmware don’t have official security updates and rely on the package maintainers. These are not considered part of the Debian distro, and I don’t even have them enabled on my servers.
Out-of-the-box, Debian only enables the main repo, plus the non-free-firmware one if any of your devices require it (e.g. Nvidia graphics, Realtek Bluetooth, etc). You have to manually enable contrib and non-free, and by doing that, it’s assumed you know what you’re doing.
In the case of non-free and non-free-firmware, they can be closed source software (like the Nvidia drivers) or have a non-open-source license that doesn’t allow distributing modified versions. In those cases, the Debian team is unable to patch them even if they wanted to.
This has always been the case with Ubuntu. Ubuntu only ever supported its main repository with security updates. Now they offer (paid) support for the universe repository in addition, which is a bonus for Ubuntu users, as they now have a greater selection of packages with security updates.
If you don’t opt-in to use Ubuntu Pro, nothing changes and Ubuntu will be as secure (or insecure) as it has always been. If you disable universe and multiverse you have a Ubuntu system where all packages receive guaranteed security updates for free.
Please note: I still don’t recommend Ubuntu due to snapd not supporting third-party repositories, but that’s no reason not to get the facts right.
Debian has always been the better choice if you required security updates for the complete package repository.
Personally I have my doubts if Debian actually manages to reliably backport security updates for all its packages. Afterall Eclipse was stuck on version 3.8 for multiple Debian releases due to lack of a maintainer …
TLDR: Ubuntu Pro offers additional security patches to packages found in the universe repo. Universe is community maintained so Ubuntu is essentially stepping in to provide critical CVE patches to some popular software in this repo that the community has not addressed.
I suppose it depends on how you look at it but I don’t really see this as withholding patches. Software in this repo would otherwise be missing these patches and it’s a ton of work for Ubuntu to provide these patches themselves.
Now is they move glibc to universe and tell me to subscribe to get updates I’ll feel differently.
Debian includes ffmpeg, for example, in the main stable repo. Given Debian’s reputation, I would think they are including these security patches in a timely manner, though I’m not entirely sure how to compare specific patches to verify this.
Of course, everything changes when you are selling support contracts. Canonical and Red Hat are the big two for enterprise because they provide support.
When I was last running Ubuntu on desktop, I signed up for an account and enabled these extra security updates. Yeah, it’s “free”, but it requires jumping through hoops. Requiring an account to get patches is the kind of user-hostile design pattern I expect from Apple or Google, but not in the desktop Linux world.
Debian’s contrib repo, which is the equivalent of Ubuntu’s universe repo, doesn’t get security updates from the Debian security team, as it’s not considered an official part of Debian. Package maintianers have to provide security updates. www.debian.org/security/faq#contrib
The difference is that Ubuntu provide paid support for contrib packages, including patches. Debian doesn’t have any official paid support options.
Nobody else has this hybrid model. RHEL is a paid distro in general. Most others are just free entirely. They all patch CVEs when they can. Ubuntu doesn’t write all of their patches or anything.
No, they aren’t. You can switch to their Universe patches anytime, at your own risk. If you want Canonical to mitigate that risk for you, you pay. Simple, really.
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