Ubuntu News Archives

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS has been released as the first point release of the current Long Term Support series that began in April with the "Noble Numbat" debut.

Thanks to the Canonical decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream Linux kernels in Ubuntu releases moving forward, Ubuntu 24.10 shipping in October will have the Linux 6.11 kernel that is debuting as stable in mid-September. Canonical's kernel engineers are currently preparing for rolling out that new kernel version in the Oracular Oriole archive.

Ubuntu maker Canonical partnered with AMD for supporting Ubuntu Linux on the AMD-Xilinx Kria development boards for their UltraScale+ / Versal Adaptive SoC evaluation kit. Currently the official builds are based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS but it appears an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS build is being worked on and will come complete with Wayland support.

With the exception of critical security issues/bugs, Canonical will be skipping over shipping stable release updates for the Linux kernel in Ubuntu until early October.

There are a few interesting bits of information as part of this week's updates from the Ubuntu Desktop Team Integration Squad.

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu desktop provided an update around recent efforts on Ubuntu 24.10.

Ahead of the now in-place Ubuntu 24.10 feature freeze, the Ubuntu GNOME X.Org session support was split off into its own separate binary Debian package from the main (default) Wayland session handling.

Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS was scheduled to ship this week but has now been delayed to the end of August in order to address some high profile upgrade bugs.

Following decisions like exploring -O3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux, another newly-announced change by Canonical I must applaud is their decision to commit to shipping the very latest upstream kernel code at release time.

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS the engineers at Canonical began focusing more on the performance of Ubuntu and establishing a performance team at the company. This work is ongoing and for Ubuntu 24.10 they are exploring another exciting area: leveraging "-O3" compiler optimizations for Ubuntu packages. Available today is an experimental build of the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs that are compiled for the -O3 optimization level.

Ubuntu maker Canonical (Canonical Group Limited) recently filed their financial statements with UK's Companies House that offers a fresh look at their financial performance.

Oliver Smith with Canonical has been communicating a lot in recent months around the great improvements planned for Ubuntu 24.10. Canonical engineers and the Ubuntu community have been working on many significant improvements for the desktop in Ubuntu 24.10. Today is a new blog post by Oliver to highlight some of the recent changes.

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was a fundamental change made by Canonical to enable frame pointers by default for their packages in the name of improving the debugging and profiling experience. This has been as part of a broader push by Canonical to focus more on Ubuntu Linux performance and ensuring the needs of developers are met. With Ubuntu 24.10, more of the packages will have frame pointer support enabled.

A new Ubuntu utility seeing an uptick in development recently is crypto-config as a means of system-wide cryptography configuration.

GNOME's Mutter 46.2-1ubuntu0.24.04.1 package was uploaded on Friday for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users. This Mutter compositor update not only brings Mutter 46.2 changes to this current Ubuntu release but also pulls in all of the 46.1 upstream changes too.

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced "Everything LTS" as a new initiative where for Ubuntu Pro customers they will offer up a twelve year LTS period for any open-source Docker image.

With Ubuntu 24.10 due for release in October one of the expressed planned changes has been NVIDIA defaulting to using Wayland rather than X11 for the default desktop session. As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

Last month some of the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop plans were laid out such as NVIDIA Wayland by default, a new welcome wizard, and more. Canonical's Oliver Smith has posted an update today around some of the ongoing Ubuntu 24.10 desktop enhancements.

Similar to the real-time kernel for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Canonical announced today the availability of their new real-time "RT" kernel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. But like with the existing Ubuntu RT kernels, this real-time support is limited to Ubuntu Pro subscriptions.

One of the newest open-source projects in-development by Ubuntu maker Canonical is a new C# written program called Flamenco.

Canonical announced this morning an optimized Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Milk-V Mars, a "credit card sized" RISC-V single board computer.

Oliver Smith who is serving as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical has shared some roadmap plans around Ubuntu 24.10. With this being the first post-LTS release following last month's Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support, they are more free to innovate this cycle and they have a lot of great plans for enhancing the Linux desktop experience.

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek just released Mir 2.17 as the newest version of this open-source Wayland compositor that can be used for building Wayland-based shells and has shown some interesting potential with the likes of Miracle-WM and Miriway.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical has now rolled out Landscape 24.04 LTS as the first long-term support version of this commercial software for managing a fleet of Ubuntu systems from a web-based portal. Landscape is part of the Ubuntu Pro subscription package and from the web-based environment makes it easier to manage Ubuntu systems in the enterprise.

Plans to have official support for the Arm-based Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Gen1 laptop in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS sadly didn't pan out. But there is semi-working support available for running Ubuntu 24.04 on this Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 powered laptop.

While GNOME landed experimental Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support in GNOME 46 that is used by the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, Canonical isn't yet encouraging users to test out this option.

For those keeping track of Ubuntu's animal-themed codenames, Ubuntu 24.10 is now confirmed to be the Oracular Oriole.

The release ISOs for Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" are now available! Ubuntu 24.04 is an exciting Long Term Support (LTS) update with this new Linux distribution release being powered by the Linux 6.8 kernel, making use of Netplan for networking on the desktop, features the modernized desktop OS installer, various performance optimizations, and a ton of new features.

For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there's also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system.

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta release is now available for testing ahead of the official release later this month for this new Long Term Support release of Ubuntu Linux.

Following yesterday's news of Canonical launching Ubuntu Pro For Devices, the latest mobile/embedded news in the Ubuntu space this week is Canonical partnering with Qualcomm.

Complementing Canonical's existing Ubuntu Pro subscription service for expanded security maintenance, live kernel patching, compliance and hardening, real-time kernel flavor support, and other enterprise/support add-ons, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro For Devices.

After years being used by Ubuntu Server/Cloud, Ubuntu 23.10 began making use of Canonical's Netplan declarative network configuration software and now Netplan is fully ready to take on all duties with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After seven years of development, Netplan 1.0 is ready for primetime use from servers to desktops.

The Ubuntu 24.04 beta won't be happening tomorrow as planned but has been pushed back by one week due to the XZ security nightmare and wanting to rebuild packages out of an abundance of caution.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has spent the past several months exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 based images for leveraging the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level capabilities to target the level embracing AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other instructions supported largely since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator era processors. As shown in benchmarks Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds can deliver better performance for the AMD/Intel systems of the past number of years. Canonical's latest foray in this area is offering up Microsoft Azure images that are tailored for x86-64-v3.

Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) releases have been support for 10 years of updates by Canonical while now that has been extended to 12 years but only for Ubuntu Pro customers going for their legacy support add-on. This 12 year support is extended retroactively going back to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

The Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release next month will roll out initial support in its server installer for being able to handle root file-system setups on NVMe-over-TCP scenarios for remote drives.

A proposal has been laid out by Canonical engineers to include various performance tooling in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by default to help in those trying to squeeze out greater performance gains out of their hardware/software and/or debugging/profiling issues. The proposal wants to "make Ubuntu absolutely great for performance engineers" but would mean somewhat significant size increases to the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs.

There had been some hope that the Ubuntu 24.04 desktop would support the JPEG-XL image format out-of-the-box, but that isn't going to happen as a default change.

Now rolling into March, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS "Noble Numbat" has entered its feature freeze period ahead of its official release in April.

Ubuntu/Canonical has for a while now promoted the prospects of Rust programming within the Linux kernel and one of their kernel engineers, Andrea Righi, wrote a Rust-written Linux scheduler with promising results that leverages eBPF for dynamically loading it at run-time. While Ubuntu isn't yet committing to using it as part of their distribution, appearing on the Ubuntu blog today was more praise for the work and even talking about the potential for a "micro-kernel design" in the future via leveraging Rust and eBPF.

Canonical has released the Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS images today as the latest point release for this ongoing Long-Term Support series ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS debut in April.

The Ubuntu 24.04 LTS desktop installer has rolled out accessibility options built into the initial GUI for helping enable additional features.

Canonical is continuing the emphasis on Snaps for the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release.

Canonical engineer Till Kamppeter was at FOSDEM 2024 last weekend in Belgium to talk up the Snap packaging format spearheaded for Ubuntu Linux as well as their ongoing work around Ubuntu Core Desktop for providing an all-Snap based operating system.

Last month it was noted on Phoronix that Canonical's kernel team is looking at folding their low-latency kernel optimizations into their generic kernel builds. Right now Ubuntu maintains a separate "lowlatency" kernel flavor with Kconfig tweaks in the name of low-latency responsiveness as an alternative to their "generic" kernel default, but for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS it continues looking like they'll move forward with this change of incorporating the changes into their default kernel build.

In addition to exploring low-latency changes for the "generic" kernel image, frame pointers by default, and possible x86-64-v3 optimizations, another area being invested into feature work for this next long-term support release is on the desktop provisioning side. Building off work of their new Ubuntu desktop installer and unifying the installation tech that has already been used by Ubuntu Server, Canonical is hoping for a nice desktop provisioning experience in facilitating automated installations, managed desktop setups within enterprises, and OEM/ODM deployments.

For fans of the Ubuntu Touch platform maintained by UBports for enjoying Linux on tablets and smartphones is out with their 4th Over The Air update based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base.

With Ubuntu looking at applying their low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel builds in order to eliminate maintaining their existing "lowlatency" kernel option, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance impact of their low-latency kernel against their "generic" default kernel used on Ubuntu Linux systems.

Ubuntu has long provided a "low-latency" kernel build intended for industrial embedded systems and other latency sensitive environments. Ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical is looking at applying those low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel build.