Let's Talk OS 8
One month ago today we released elementary OS 7.1 which provides new personalization options that make it more inclusive and accessible, protects your privacy and ensures apps always operate with your explicit consent, and addresses your feedback with over 200 bug fixes, design changes, and new features. This point release concludes our feature focus on the OS 7 series and development focus has now shifted to OS 8! Let’s take a look at what that means and the progress we’ve made in the last month.
What happens to OS 7?
Folks running elementary OS 7 should expect fewer updates from this point forward. We do our best to continue to provide bug fix updates for as long as is reasonable—which sometimes extends into the lifecycle of the next major series—but the OS 7 series should largely be considered complete. There are a number of large architectural changes and transitions expected for the OS 8 series which means that some components will not be able to be backported to OS 7. All apps provided as Flatpak packages however will continue to receive updates indefinitely. That means all AppCenter apps, sideloaded Flatpak apps, and a decent portion of pre-installed apps—Calculator, Camera, the Captive Network Assistant, Videos, Music, Screenshot, GNOME Web, Document Viewer, and Archive Manager—will all continue to receive both bug fix and feature updates effectively forever. And since we build elementary OS from the Ubuntu Long Term Support repositories, you’ll continue to receive security and bug fix updates from Canonical until 2027. So while OS 7 is no longer our development focus, you can still expect regular maintenance for quite some time!