As noted by several other people already, Jenkins releases which are essential for security, performance and feature-availability reasons require Java 8. Since Ubuntu 14.04LTS is still a current, supported release it's difficult to understand how a core component of a server platform like Java would lag behind for such a long time.
Upgrading to Ubuntu 16 is on our roadmap, but it's non-trivial. In the interim, I have no defensible reason to offer people who are legitimately concerned about the delay in our plans to upgrade Jenkins.
As noted by several other people already, Jenkins releases which are essential for security, performance and feature- availability reasons require Java 8. Since Ubuntu 14.04LTS is still a current, supported release it's difficult to understand how a core component of a server platform like Java would lag behind for such a long time.
Upgrading to Ubuntu 16 is on our roadmap, but it's non-trivial. In the interim, I have no defensible reason to offer people who are legitimately concerned about the delay in our plans to upgrade Jenkins.