Tracktion Waveform 13 and Ubuntu 20.04.6 GOOD NEWS

[edrickblade]

Canonical expands total coverage for Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on

*Expansion ensures business continuity without forcing major upgrades

Today, Canonical announced the expansion of the Legacy add-on for Ubuntu Pro, extending total coverage for Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years. Starting with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), this extension brings the full benefits of Ubuntu Pro – including continuous security patching, compliance tooling and support for your OS – to long-lived production systems.

In highly regulated or hardware-dependent industries, upgrades threaten to disrupt tightly controlled security and compliance. For many organizations, maintaining production systems for more than a decade is complex, but remains a more sensible option than a full upgrade.

That’s why, in 2024, we first introduced the Legacy add-on for Ubuntu Pro, starting with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr). The Legacy add-on increased the total maintenance window for Ubuntu LTS releases to 12 years: five years of standard security maintenance, five years of Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM), and two years of additional coverage with the Legacy add-on – with optional support throughout. Due to the positive reception and growing interest in longer lifecycle coverage, we’re excited to now extend the Legacy add-on to 5 years, bringing a 15-year security maintenance and support window to Ubuntu LTS releases.

So Waveform users now don't need to worry about an outdated UBUNTU version as the official Tracktion supported distro, as we know the official supported and tested distro is UBUNTU 20.04.6 as shows here in Tracktion official website

A 15-year lifecycle for stability


Throughout this 15-year window, Ubuntu Pro provides continuous security maintenance across the entire Ubuntu base, kernel, and key open source components. Canonical’s security team actively scans, triages, and backports critical, high, and select medium CVEs to all maintained LTS releases, ensuring security without forcing disruptive major upgrades that break compatibility or require re-certification.

Break/fix support remains an optional add-on. When production issues arise, you can get access to our Support team through this service and troubleshoot with experts who contribute to Ubuntu every day, who’ve seen similar problems before and know how to resolve them quickly.

The scope of the Legacy add-on itself is unchanged, but the commitment is longer, giving users additional years to manage transition timelines and maintain compliance.

This updated coverage applies from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS onward. With this extension, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is now supported until April 2029, a full 15 years after its debut.

More Info: HERE

[talby]

I perfectly understand your positive vibes about LTS, but LTS for the core of a Linux distribution does not equal LTS for all of its apps, and certainly not for the by other company provided WF app.
And for running Waveform on Linux maybe understand it more as literally written on the Tracktion page: "tested" on a certain Ubuntu version. Doesn't this read slightly different than "supported"? - I anyway have the feeling that regarding this information the Tracktion site isn't updated as frequently as it should.
If WF12 was tested on Ubuntu20 then this doesn't mean that in the future, when some WF19 could exist, that such newest version of WF will still be tested on Ubuntu20 or that WF12 would still be cared for at all.

Better include frequent updates and upgrades into your plans.

[edrickblade]

I perfectly understand your positive vibes about LTS, but LTS for the core of a Linux distribution does not equal LTS for all of its apps, and certainly not for the by other company provided WF app.
And for running Waveform on Linux maybe understand it more as literally written on the Tracktion page: "tested" on a certain Ubuntu version. Doesn't this read slightly different than "supported"? - I anyway have the feeling that regarding this information the Tracktion site isn't updated as frequently as it should.
If WF12 was tested on Ubuntu20 then this doesn't mean that in the future, when some WF19 could exist, that such newest version of WF will still be tested on Ubuntu20 or that WF12 would still be cared for at all.

Better include frequent updates and upgrades into your plans.

Thanks for your reply, at least WF12 doesn't even install in UBUNTU 24.04 by dependency problems and WF13 show some bugs in the same latest distro version, but it works as supposed in UBUNTU 20.04.6 because that .deb is build in UBUNTU 20.04 and tested before they release it, Tracktion Team are the developers, if they require xBuntu 20.04 it's because they know what they talking about.

[talby]

That's interesting!
I installed WF13.5 flawlessly to Ubuntu Studio 24.10, and recently upgraded to Ubuntu Studio 25.10, and WF runs quite good there - at least better than on Debian 13 with KDE (Wayland), On Debian I sometimes run into GUI rendering issues, although the glibc and other library versions are nominal the same than in Ubuntu Studio 24 (if I remember correctly my fruitless debugging attempts from some month ago). Both versions of Ubuntu Studio use KDE (Wayland), and PipeWire, by the way. Which desktop environment and audio system have you running in your Ubuntu? It would be interesting to know if the DE would maybe make the difference.

[edrickblade]

That's interesting!
I installed WF13.5 flawlessly to Ubuntu Studio 24.10, and recently upgraded to Ubuntu Studio 25.10, and WF runs quite good there - at least better than on Debian 13 with KDE (Wayland), On Debian I sometimes run into GUI rendering issues, although the glibc and other library versions are nominal the same than in Ubuntu Studio 24 (if I remember correctly my fruitless debugging attempts from some month ago). Both versions of Ubuntu Studio use KDE (Wayland), and PipeWire, by the way. Which desktop environment and audio system have you running in your Ubuntu? It would be interesting to know if the DE would maybe make the difference.

I've tried in KDE NEON 24.04 pure Pipewire, and WF13 opens but freezes too much, also "clip effects" is buggy making the audio clips going out of time, also "drumsampler" stock plugin gets 99% and 100% of CPU, making WF13 freeze llike crazy. I'll try to run WF13 in UBUNTU 20.04.6 lts because is the recommended distro by Tracktion and WF13 is the only intuitive DAW I purchased, I can say Ardour 8.12 runs flawlessly in KDE NEON 24.04 but it doesn't have the composition tools WF13 has.