Canonical has simply launched Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed Plucky Puffin, for most of the people. It is a secure launch, however not a long-term help model, so it’s solely going to be alive for 9 months earlier than help is dropped. These non-LTS releases are nice for individuals who desire a secure expertise, but in addition need to strive cutting-edge options.

The important thing spotlight on this replace is GNOME 48, which brings with it notification stacking, digital well-being settings, triple buffering patches for smoother efficiency (which Canonical contributed), and extra. This model of Ubuntu additionally consists of an app known as Papers, a PDF reader for a extra fashionable and user-friendly expertise.

To assist help timezone detection, climate forecasts, and evening gentle options on the desktop, Ubuntu 25.04 ships with the BeaconDB geolocation service. Canonical made this variation as a result of Mozilla retired its geolocation service, which had beforehand been relied upon.

One other large change on this replace is the inclusion of Linux 6.14. Canonical mentioned that it features a new NTSYNC driver that emulates WinNT sync primitives, enabling higher efficiency potential for Home windows video games working on WINE and Proton (Steam Play). Canonical additionally mentioned:

“Kernel builders can now make use of a brand new scheduling system, sched_ext, which gives a mechanism to implement scheduling insurance policies as eBPF applications. This permits builders to defer scheduling choices to plain user-space applications and implement absolutely practical hot-swappable Linux schedulers, utilizing any language, device, library, or useful resource accessible in user-space.”

By way of {hardware} help, Canonical has made a brand new ISO picture out there with 25.04 that allows it to work on ARM64 gadgets, and Qualcomm has mentioned this paves the way in which for Ubuntu to finally run on Snapdragon chips. Ubuntu 25.04 additionally brings full-featured help for the Intel Core Extremely 200V sequence with built-in Arc GPUs and Intel Arc B580 and B570 “Battlemage” discrete GPUs, Canonical mentioned:

“The brand new additions embrace improved GPU and CPU ray tracing rendering efficiency in purposes with Intel Embree help, corresponding to Blender (v4.2+). Ray tracing {hardware} acceleration on the GPU improves body rendering by 20-30%, resulting from a 2-4x speed-up for the ray tracing part. These GPUs now even have help enabled for {hardware} accelerated video encoding of AVC, JPEG, HEVC, and AV1, thus enhancing efficiency when utilizing these codecs when in comparison with software program encoding.”

The brand new replace is offered for obtain now on Ubuntu.com. You probably have Ubuntu put in already, you possibly can improve to this model, too. If you’re on an LTS launch and need to improve, you’ll have to take further steps outlined right here.