Extending ROS Noetic Support with ESM-Enabled Content Snaps

Since ROS Noetic reached end of life in May 2025, the Ubuntu Robotics team has been working to ensure that developers and organizations can continue building and deploying robots securely on Ubuntu.

To build on this foundation, Canonical has now extended its ESM (Expanded Security Maintenance) for ROS coverage to ROS Noetic content-sharing snaps. This update is a significant step toward long-term support and security for ROS environments distributed through the Snap ecosystem, ensuring developers can continue to rely on maintained and compatible components.

What are content-sharing snaps?

Content-sharing snaps are a key feature of the Snap ecosystem that allow multiple snaps to share common dependencies, such as ROS libraries, tools, and assets, without duplication. This model simplifies packaging, improves consistency, and reduces image size across robotic systems. You can learn more about the benefits of following a modular architecture for your ROS robots here.

The Ubuntu Robotics team maintains several content-sharing snaps on the Snap Store – such as ros-noetic-desktop and ros-noetic-ros-base – which serve as the foundation for many ROS-based applications.

With ESM now integrated, these content snaps continue to receive security updates and maintenance, ensuring developers can build and deploy with confidence as ROS 1 transitions into its long-term maintenance phase. What’s more, this benefit is free – no Pro token is required.

Why this matters

Robotics projects often have long lifecycles, where stability and security are critical. While ROS Noetic is no longer maintained upstream, Canonical’s ESM for ROS service delivers ongoing CVE patches and security fixes for both ROS and Ubuntu packages.

By extending ESM for ROS to content-sharing snaps, we’re giving developers the same long-term security guarantees in the snap ecosystem that they already rely on in Ubuntu’s ESM for deb packages. This means:

• Continued security maintenance for ROS Noetic environments distributed through snaps.
• A unified and consistent experience across both deb-based and snap-based systems.
• Easier access to maintained ROS libraries for new and existing robotic deployments.

Continuing long-term support for the ROS community

This update reflects Canonical’s ongoing commitment to the ROS ecosystem – helping developers and organizations extend the life of their robots securely and sustainably. With ESM for ROS now available in both deb and snap formats, Ubuntu continues to be the trusted foundation for secure, long-term robotics innovation.

Learn more

• What is ESM for ROS
• Tutorial: Building ROS snaps with content sharing
• ESM for ROS: 15 things you need to know