How to enable Ubuntu Pro to gain 10 years of security for your desktop

Ubuntu Pro is a service Canonical introduced a while ago that ensures your operating system and over 23,000 applications receive security updates for 10 years. That’s impressive. 

For those who might not understand the implications, imagine you could install an operating system and never have to re-install it for 10 years. 

The entire time you use that operating system, you don’t have to worry about a stoppage in security updates. That’s a departure from most operating systems that give you around five years of updates. 

One thing to keep in mind is that Ubuntu Pro can only be installed on Long Term Support (LTS) releases, such as 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, and 22.04. 

For anyone who uses Ubuntu as a personal desktop operating system, you can have Ubuntu Pro for free. That’s right, it’s an important service for the Ubuntu Linux distribution and it can be had for free (so long as you’re using it for personal reasons). 

Also: Ubuntu Linux tries for the office desktop 

Although Ubuntu Pro is available for free, it’s not installed or enabled by default. I’m going to show you how to do just that.

How to enable Ubuntu Pro to gain 10 years of security for your desktop

Requirements

To make this work, you’ll need the following: A running instance of an LTS Ubuntu release, an Ubuntu Pro account (it’s free), your Ubuntu Pro token (more on this in a bit), and a user with sudo privileges.

That’s all you need. Let’s get to the enabling.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-advantage-tools=27.13.5~$(lsb_release -rs).1

One thing to keep in mind is you’ll want to make sure you’re installing the latest stable release of ubuntu-advantage-tools by checking this site before running the command. Substitute 27.13.5 for whatever latest stable release is listed.

(TOKEN is the Ubuntu Pro token you copied from your dashboard).

The above command will print out something like this:

1678 packages installed:
 	1642 packages from Ubuntu Main/Restricted repository
 	34 packages from Ubuntu Universe/Multiverse repository
 	2 packages no longer available for download

You can find out how many packages are associated with ESM with the command:

pro security-status --esm-apps

Upgrade those packages with the command:

The apt-get command will pick up all upgrades (including those associated with ESM). If you don’t want to run the upgrade command, you can also wait until you’re prompted by the GUI to apply upgrades as they become available.

Also: How to choose the right Linux desktop distribution

And that is all there is to enabling 10 years of security updates for your Ubuntu desktop. This process also works for Ubuntu Server, so if you’ve deployed Ubuntu to your home network, you can take advantage of the program as well.