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How Cinc adds and drops platforms

How Cinc adds and drops platforms

October 11, 2026·ramereth

Until now, Cinc has dropped end-of-life operating systems whenever someone got to it, sometimes a year after the OS stopped getting updates, and our build docs disagreed about the rules. We’ve written down one policy that applies to every Cinc product, and we’re applying it now.

The policy

  • Dropping: a platform is end-of-life on the date endoflife.date lists as its end of security support. Paid extended support doesn’t count. Each release line stops building it in its next release after that date. Packages already published stay on downloads.cinc.sh and omnitruck.
  • Adding: new LTS and major releases of operating systems we already support (Ubuntu LTS, Debian, AlmaLinux/RHEL, Rocky, SLES, FreeBSD, macOS, Windows Server) are added in the next release once we have a builder for them.
  • Release lines: the same rules apply to every supported line, except that a line close to its own end-of-life stops taking new platforms.

The details, and a table of what each release line builds, are on the new Supported platforms page. A weekly job now checks our build matrix against endoflife.date and keeps an issue open listing platforms to drop and new releases to add, so this shouldn’t fall behind again.

What changes in the next releases

Dropped (already past end-of-life):

  • FreeBSD 13 (EOL 2026-04-30)
  • macOS 14 Sonoma (EOL 2026-09-14)
  • Ubuntu 20.04 (EOL 2025-05-31) and, on Cinc Client 18, Ubuntu 18.04

Added:

  • Rocky Linux 10, SLES 16 and Ubuntu 26.04 for Cinc Client 19 and 18 (Cinc Auditor already builds them)
  • FreeBSD 15 for Cinc Client
  • Ubuntu 26.04 for Cinc Workstation

SLES packages now build on SLES itself. Our sles packages used to be built on openSUSE Leap, and Leap 15.6 reached end-of-life in April while SLES 15 is supported until 2031. They’re now built on SUSE’s free SLE Base Container Images. Nothing changes for SLES 15 SP6+ or SLES 16 users, and openSUSE Leap hosts keep getting the same packages.

macOS 27 support will follow once we have Apple Silicon builders for it. macOS 26 is the last release for Intel Macs, so Intel packages end when macOS 26 does.

If a platform you depend on is on its way out, or you’d like one added, come talk to us in #community-distros on the Chef Community Slack.

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