Ubuntu – What happens when support has ended for a specific version of Ubuntu

Ask your Ubuntu Local Community. Those LoCo teams often hold meetings near you.

That would be the best method to get localized support. Often there is not even a need to pay for support. They just like to help you with questions.

But the people at a loco meeting also will know more about people and/or companies willing to help individuals with problems or with some form of education about Ubuntu/Linux.

Besides that it is mainly getting yourself informed by reading blogs, Q+A sites, problems others had and got fixed on-line.

Ask Ubuntu is one of the sources for individual support. Free of charge but it will not be at your actual home and it will need to be on this site since we all want to know how you messed up and learn from it ;)

From Wikipedia:

"End-of-life" (EOL) is a term used with respect to a product supplied to customers, indicating that the product is in the end of its useful life (from the vendor's point of view), and a vendor stops marketing, selling, or rework sustaining it. (The vendor may simply intend to limit or end support for the product.)

With this in mind, we can deduce that end a Ubuntu version in EOL means that it won't get supported in any way by Canonical, that is, it won't get any updates or support.

But what about a product that is in End of Standard Support? According to this article made by Canonical,

As Ubuntu LTS releases transition from the standard, public maintenance window, Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) is available for organisations with their workloads on Ubuntu LTS releases to maintain that stability and continuity, ensuring system security and compliance. With the end of its five-year standard support window in April, Canonical is announcing the availability of ESM for 14.04 starting 25 April 2019.

ESM for 14.04 provides ongoing kernel security fixes through a secure, private archive for three years until April 2022. This continued protection from major security vulnerabilities enables development and operations teams to plan and manage application upgrades in a failsafe environment.

ESM is available as a feature of an Ubuntu Advantage subscription.