Ubuntu News Archives

Canonical is looking to eliminate use of its Ubuntu ISO Tracker that has been relied on the past 15+ years and in turn 30+ releases. Their ISO Tracker has grown unreliable and difficult to maintain. But without any proper solution ready, for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ISO Tracker may be replaced by a temporary spreadsheet and Discourse thread.

Mir 2.23 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-led library for crafting Wayland-based shells and for smaller desktops to ease the adoption of Wayland, with a focus on Ubuntu Linux platforms.

Besides last-minute breakage with some executables over the switch to Rust Coreutils, Ubuntu 25.10 ended up shipping with broken Flatpak support.

Canonical just officially announced the release of Ubuntu 25.10 as the newest non-LTS release of Ubuntu Linux.

Announced over the summer by Canonical was Stubble as a way to improve the ARM64 experience by providing a minimal UEFI kernel boot stub for loading machine-specific Device Trees embedded within a kernel image. The initial focus with Stubble is on improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience on Ubuntu Linux. Thanks to some granted feature freeze exceptions, the support is ready for Ubuntu 25.10.

Back in June it was announced by Canonical that for the Ubuntu 25.10 release they would be raising the RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with barely any available RISC-V platforms supporting that newer RISC-V profile. That change is still going ahead and leaves Ubuntu 25.10 on RISC-V currently only supporting the QEMU virtualized target.

I noticed a number of benchmarks failing to run on Ubuntu 25.10 this week with reported checksum errors on the files... I quickly realized it's due to the recent Rust Coreutils transition for Ubuntu 25.10 causing some major breakage for those relying on Makeself archives.

Announced last month was the Ubuntu "Dangerous" Desktop Images as a new form of the Ubuntu Linux desktop images that would ship with leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu development images... Basically, pulling in the very latest Snaps to go along with the latest Ubuntu development Debian packages.

Canonical today released the Ubuntu 25.10 Beta as they work toward the stable Ubuntu 25.10 release in mid-October.

Canonical announced today that they will formally support the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit and also make it available via the Ubuntu repositories.

Ubuntu 25.10's transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps.

Back in May was the announcement by Canonical's kernel team that they were planning to ship Linux 6.17 in Ubuntu 25.10 as what will be the latest upstream kernel version when that Ubuntu release ships in October. But due to the timing of the Linux 6.17 release around late September and the Ubuntu 25.10 kernel freeze around the same time, it's led to some confusion with committing to a Linux 6.17-rc or potentially some suggesting Ubuntu 25.10 would ship with a Linux 6.16 kernel and then ship v6.17 as a stable release update. Well, the situation is more clear with Linux 6.17 having been merged now as the default kernel of Ubuntu 25.10.

Canonical's Launchpad service that is closely aligned with the Ubuntu project is finally deprecating code imports from CVS and Subversion repositories that go through the defunct Bazaar.

The UI freeze for Ubuntu 25.10 is now in effect as the developers work toward the release of this next Ubuntu Linux installment in October.

Following sudo-rs becoming the default sudo implementation in Ubuntu 25.10 as of a few days ago, Canonical is also proceeding with its transition of using the Rust version of Coreutils for this next Ubuntu Linux release.

Earlier this year Canonical announced plans for using sudo-rs as the Rust-written sudo implementation by default for Ubuntu 25.10 along with Rust Coreutils and other Rust system components. The sudo-rs goal has been achieved with the newest Ubuntu 25.10 daily ISOs now using this sudo implementation by default.

This week a new Ubuntu X1E Concept ISO was published for Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptop optimizations. With this new ISO the Linux 6.17 kernel is now leveraged for the latest upstream kernel bits. Additionally, the new X1E ISO is finally working again on the Acer Swifth 14 AI laptop that I have used for my Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing.

The newest monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 25.10 is now available for testing and is the final planned monthly snapshot prior to the October release of the Questing Quokka.

Mir 2.22 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical project providing libraries for building Wayland-based shells/compositors. Mir 2.22 brings some notable improvements around NVIDIA GPU/driver support as well as initial preparations for Rust programming language support.

Released on Thursday were new Ubuntu X1E "Concept" install images for installing the modified Ubuntu 25.04 environment on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops.

With the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are aiming to have a better ARM64 experience with their generic desktop ISO thanks to a new improvement they have been working on called Stubble.

While Ubuntu 25.04 has been shipping since April and following software support already upstreamed into the Linux kernel and related virtualization components, Ubuntu maker Canonical today put out a blog post to announce their AMD SEV-SNP host support found in Ubuntu 25.04. This complements the guest-side support present since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and is an important milestone on the host-side ahead of next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.

The Ubuntu Release Management Team is pursuing a new concept called "Dangerous" Desktop Images that will ship leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu daily development images.

As of today the Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is now under a feature freeze ahead of the stable release due out in October.

Canonical is pursuing a rather ambitious baseline of Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V too require the RVA23 profile that will leave most existing RISC-V developer boards to using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Ubuntu 25.04. They continue to pursue this RISC-V baseline and with more of the necessary alterations for it being prepped for landing into the Ubuntu 25.10 archive.

Back in May the Ubuntu engineers at Canonical announced plans to ship Ubuntu 25.10 with Linux 6.17 given their recent commitment to always shipping with the latest upstream Linux kernel version. They still are committing to it even if it means the kernel and Ubuntu schedules don't perfectly align and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box may end up being on an unstable "-rc" kernel.

Canonical just announced the release of Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS as the newest point release for this long-term support (LTS) operating system across desktop, server, and cloud.

For the Ubuntu 25.10 development cycle to complement the daily ISOs, Canonical began releasing monthly snapshots to facilitate more testing from the community and also in working to enhance their build automation / infrastructure. Today marks the third monthly release of Ubuntu 25.10 for testing.

Last year Canonical established a policy to always ship the latest Linux kernel version at Ubuntu release time which for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 will mean shipping with Linux v6.17. But during the Ubuntu development cycles they typically don't aggressively update to new interim versions tracking upstream, except that will now change to allow for better kernel test coverage.

For the past two years Ubuntu developers have been talking about adding TPM-based full disk encryption to the installer for those wanting to leverage their system's Trusted Platform Module 2.0 capabilities to enhance security. It looks like for Ubuntu 25.10 this October that support will finally be in good shape.

A few days back I wrote about Canonical releasing new Ubuntu 25.04 "Concept" ISOs for the Snapdragon X laptops with the new install images being re-based to the Linux 6.16 kernel and expanding the device support. But as I found out from my own testing, depending upon the laptop the support was still less than ideal. Since then there have been two more ISO releases and addressing one of my show-stopping problems albeit encountering another.

The Ubuntu Concept ISO images that contain experimental patches -- or "hacks" to make things work -- to enable Ubuntu Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops is out with a fresh spin. The new Ubuntu Concept ISOs move to using the Linux 6.16 kernel while also enabling some additional Snapdragon X laptop models.

Canonical announced today that they teamed up with ESWIN Computing to ship Ubuntu Linux as the preferred operating system on their ESWIN Computing EBC77 Series single board computer.

Ubuntu maker Canonical today released Multipass 1.16 stable for this Linux / Windows / macOS means of deploying Ubuntu VM instances using this lightweight VM manager built atop Linux's KVM, Windows' Hyper-V, and QEMU on macOS. Notable with Multipass 1.16 is that it's now fully open-source software.

Miracle-WM 0.6 is out today as a mega release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor by Canonical/Ubuntu developer Matthew Kosarek. Miracle-WM provides tiling window manager support inspired by i3 and Sway while being one of the most pronounced users of the Mir code.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has decided to "double down" their investment in OpenJDK Java for Ubuntu Linux.

Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical today publicly announced the formation of their "Debcrafters" global team to help ensure the health of the Ubuntu Archive.

Similar to the Ubuntu 24.10 concept ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops, Canonical has begun publishing new "concept" images of Ubuntu 25.04 ISOs optimized for use on the growing number of Qualcomm Snpadragon X Elite laptops. This week marks the release of the new ISOs for enhancing Ubuntu Linux on various ARM laptops.

Canonical's Multipass lightweight VM manager for not only Linux systems but also Windows and macOS is now considered fully open-source. Multipass started out as a means of running an Ubuntu environment with ease from a single command on major operating systems. With today's Multipass 1.16 release candidate, it's now fully open-source.

A decade ago Canonical did around $81 million in revenue (2014) with a head count of around 337 at the company behind Ubuntu Linux while their Linux desktop efforts were still gaining a footing with OEMs/ODMs pre-loads, within enterprise desktop environments, and the lucrative server/cloud space. Canonical recently filed their 2024 annual report and they are now up to almost $300 million USD in revenue and a headcount of more than 1,100.

Mir 2.21 is out today for this Ubuntu/Canonical project to serve as a set of libraries used to simplify the development of Wayland-based shells/environments.

Last month Canonical announced plans for releasing monthly Ubuntu Linux development snapshots and was followed by the Questing Snapshot 1 release in the road toward Ubuntu 25.10. Out today is the Questing Snapshot 2 release for incorporating the latest Ubuntu 25.10 development changes.

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year.

With less than one year to go until the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release and trying to get any major changes into Ubuntu 25.10 for extra baking, Ubuntu engineers have been evaluating some Ubuntu Server seed changes.

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical announced they will be sunsetting their Bazaar distributed revision control system code hosting with Launchpad. Git wins.

Ubuntu developers have recently started a discussion over possibly splitting up the "linux-firmware" package into multiple sub-packages given the growing size of all the different firmware binaries needed to support the diverse range of hardware supported by the Linux kernel. It's nice in theory for helping to reduce the install footprint of Ubuntu Linux but in practice will be difficult to pull off without potentially risking the out-of-the-box hardware support on Ubuntu Linux.

Canonical is sticking to Ubuntu Linux releases every six months and a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years, but a new change to their development process is that they are now working to release monthly Ubuntu snapshots of their testing stream.

Ubuntu 25.10 is joining the likes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise that are using Chrony as their Network Time Protocol (NTP) implementation. Ubuntu 25.10 is switching over to Chrony in enabling Network Time Security (NTS) support on Ubuntu Linux.

The Canonical Kernel Team confirmed their plans today that with the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are planning to employ the Linux 6.17 kernel.

A public Ubuntu 25.10 desktop road-map was published today to outline some of the plans that Canonical engineers are beginning to work on ahead of the next Ubuntu Linux release in October.