What are the specifics of 18.04's ten year support?

Solution 1:

The Releases page has some clear dates for how long security support will last.

For 18.04, it's 5 years of standard security support + 5 years of ESM (ESM = "Extended Security Maintenance").

• 2019-03-04 - first public list for 14.04 ESM.
• 2017-04-13 - first public list for 12.04 ESM.

We (Canonical) do need to improve on publishing the ESM source package list more in advance.

From either list on the Releases page you can see what packages were included in previous releases to get a general idea. Desktop packages are not being considered.

I'll update this answer as we publish more.