Thursday, April 17th 2025
Canonical Releases Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin
Today Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed "Plucky Puffin. Ubuntu 25.04 delivers the latest GNOME 48 with support for triple buffering and an improved install and boot experience. The introduction of a "devpack" for Spring expands toolchain availability in Ubuntu. Advancements in silicon enablement with Canonical's partners deliver performance improvements for AI workloads on Intel GPUs, and support for confidential computing on AMD SEV-SNP.
"Plucky Puffin combines the very latest in open source desktop technology with a focus on making high quality developer tooling readily available on Ubuntu. Ubuntu 25.04 delivers performance improvements across Intel GPUs, and a new purpose-built ISO for ARM64 hardware enthusiasts. Our increasing support for confidential computing with AMD SEV-SNP makes Ubuntu the target platform to deploy AI workloads securely and at scale on both public clouds and private data centers.", Jon Seager, VP of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical
GNOME 48 brings user experience improvements
Ubuntu 25.04 delivers GNOME 48, in line with Canonical's commitment to ship the freshest Gnome releases possible. Among other enhancements in GNOME, this version brings new features like a "Preserve Battery Health" mode that helps extend the lifespan of laptop batteries by optimizing charge cycles. A new "Wellbeing Panel" provides screen-time tracking, and helps users manage their usage habits. With GNOME 48, Ubuntu gains HDR support out of the box, and the Canonical-developed triple buffering patches, which deliver higher performance and a smoother UX on desktops with lower rendering power. These patches are now part of the GNOME upstream project for the first time, benefitting all users of the GNOME desktop environment.
Plucky Puffin ships with "Papers" as its default new PDF reader. Papers offers a more modern design, improved performance and a more user-friendly experience.
Following the retirement of Mozilla's geolocation service, Ubuntu 25.04 uses a new geolocation provider: BeaconDB. This new geolocation service enables automatic timezone detection, weather forecasting and night light features in the desktop.
Linux 6.14 kernel delivers improved scheduling
This release delivers the latest Linux kernel, following Canonical's new policy. Kernel developers can now make use of a new scheduling system, sched_ext, which provides a mechanism to implement scheduling policies as eBPF programs. This enables developers to defer scheduling decisions to standard user-space programs and implement fully functional hot-swappable Linux schedulers, using any language, tool, library, or resource accessible in user-space.
A new NTSYNC driver that emulates WinNT sync primitives is also available, delivering better performance potential for Windows games running on Wine and Proton (Steam Play).
The bpftools and linux-perf tools have been decoupled from the kernel version, making dependency management easier for developers working with containers. These tools are now shipped in their own packages.
Other features can be found in the Linux 6.14 upstream changelog.
Enhanced installer and boot experience
The installer delivers an improved user experience for those installing Ubuntu alongside other operating systems, with advanced partitioning and encryption options, as well as better interaction with existing BitLocker-enabled Windows installations.
To further improve the boot experience in future releases, Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server will include Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools. Plucky Puffin offers Dracut as an experimental feature, enabling users to test it ahead of its inclusion in Ubuntu 25.10.
Cutting-edge toolchains and devpacks
Ubuntu 25.04 comes with the latest toolchains for Python, Golang, Rust, .NET, LLVM, OpenJDK and GCC.
Additional early access upstream versions such as OpenJDK 24ea, OpenJDK 25ea, and GCC 15 are also available. The.NET plugin in Snapcraft delivers improvements for.Net content snaps, and provides increased parity with MSBuild options.
With this release, Canonical is expanding toolchain availability on Ubuntu to a broader set of developer tools like formatters and linters, delivering the latest versions in snap bundles known as "devpacks."
The first of these is a new "devpack-for-spring" snap that brings the latest Spring Framework and Spring Boot projects to Ubuntu, enabling application developers to more easily build and test their applications using the latest Spring project versions - Spring Framework 6.1 and 6.2, and Spring Boot 3.3 and 3.4.
Improved manageability and networking controls
Canonical continues to deliver identity and access management features for system administrators which will be available in all Ubuntu LTS releases, including many enhancements to Authd, Ubuntu's new authentication service for cloud identity providers. This service now supports Google IAM in addition to Entra ID. ADSys, the Active Directory Group Policy client for Ubuntu, supports the latest Polkit and comes with improvements and bug fixes to certificates enrolment.
The availability of NTS-enabled time servers allows Ubuntu 25.04 to use securely provided network time by default.
NetworkManager now includes support for wpa-psk-sha256 secured WiFi networks and allows routing-policy configuration on the backend.
Plucky Puffin is also the first release that uses Netplan and systemd-networkd's wait-online feature to check for DNS resolution, providing a more reliable way to wait for a system to be considered online.
Hardware enablement highlights
Canonical continues to enable Ubuntu across a broad range of hardware. The introduction of a new ARM64 Desktop ISO makes it easier for early adopters to install Ubuntu Desktop on ARM64 virtual machines and laptops.
Confidential computing represents a significant paradigm shift in security architecture, protecting virtual machine workloads from unauthorized access. This technology shields sensitive code and data at runtime from privileged system software and other VMs, by operating within a hardware-protected Trusted Execution Environment, keeping data encrypted while in system memory.
Canonical has long recognized confidential computing as an area of strategic importance. Ubuntu was the first Linux distribution to support confidential VMs as a guest OS across major public cloud providers, with built-in support for AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX technologies.
Today, Canonical is pleased to announce that Ubuntu now supports AMD SEV-SNP on virtualization hosts, made possible by QEMU 9.2. This will enable enterprises to deploy confidential VMs in on-premise data centers using Ubuntu as both the host and guest operating system.
Source:
Canonical
"Plucky Puffin combines the very latest in open source desktop technology with a focus on making high quality developer tooling readily available on Ubuntu. Ubuntu 25.04 delivers performance improvements across Intel GPUs, and a new purpose-built ISO for ARM64 hardware enthusiasts. Our increasing support for confidential computing with AMD SEV-SNP makes Ubuntu the target platform to deploy AI workloads securely and at scale on both public clouds and private data centers.", Jon Seager, VP of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical
Ubuntu 25.04 delivers GNOME 48, in line with Canonical's commitment to ship the freshest Gnome releases possible. Among other enhancements in GNOME, this version brings new features like a "Preserve Battery Health" mode that helps extend the lifespan of laptop batteries by optimizing charge cycles. A new "Wellbeing Panel" provides screen-time tracking, and helps users manage their usage habits. With GNOME 48, Ubuntu gains HDR support out of the box, and the Canonical-developed triple buffering patches, which deliver higher performance and a smoother UX on desktops with lower rendering power. These patches are now part of the GNOME upstream project for the first time, benefitting all users of the GNOME desktop environment.
Plucky Puffin ships with "Papers" as its default new PDF reader. Papers offers a more modern design, improved performance and a more user-friendly experience.
Following the retirement of Mozilla's geolocation service, Ubuntu 25.04 uses a new geolocation provider: BeaconDB. This new geolocation service enables automatic timezone detection, weather forecasting and night light features in the desktop.
Linux 6.14 kernel delivers improved scheduling
This release delivers the latest Linux kernel, following Canonical's new policy. Kernel developers can now make use of a new scheduling system, sched_ext, which provides a mechanism to implement scheduling policies as eBPF programs. This enables developers to defer scheduling decisions to standard user-space programs and implement fully functional hot-swappable Linux schedulers, using any language, tool, library, or resource accessible in user-space.
A new NTSYNC driver that emulates WinNT sync primitives is also available, delivering better performance potential for Windows games running on Wine and Proton (Steam Play).
The bpftools and linux-perf tools have been decoupled from the kernel version, making dependency management easier for developers working with containers. These tools are now shipped in their own packages.
Other features can be found in the Linux 6.14 upstream changelog.
Enhanced installer and boot experience
The installer delivers an improved user experience for those installing Ubuntu alongside other operating systems, with advanced partitioning and encryption options, as well as better interaction with existing BitLocker-enabled Windows installations.
To further improve the boot experience in future releases, Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server will include Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools. Plucky Puffin offers Dracut as an experimental feature, enabling users to test it ahead of its inclusion in Ubuntu 25.10.
Ubuntu 25.04 comes with the latest toolchains for Python, Golang, Rust, .NET, LLVM, OpenJDK and GCC.
Additional early access upstream versions such as OpenJDK 24ea, OpenJDK 25ea, and GCC 15 are also available. The.NET plugin in Snapcraft delivers improvements for.Net content snaps, and provides increased parity with MSBuild options.
With this release, Canonical is expanding toolchain availability on Ubuntu to a broader set of developer tools like formatters and linters, delivering the latest versions in snap bundles known as "devpacks."
The first of these is a new "devpack-for-spring" snap that brings the latest Spring Framework and Spring Boot projects to Ubuntu, enabling application developers to more easily build and test their applications using the latest Spring project versions - Spring Framework 6.1 and 6.2, and Spring Boot 3.3 and 3.4.
Improved manageability and networking controls
Canonical continues to deliver identity and access management features for system administrators which will be available in all Ubuntu LTS releases, including many enhancements to Authd, Ubuntu's new authentication service for cloud identity providers. This service now supports Google IAM in addition to Entra ID. ADSys, the Active Directory Group Policy client for Ubuntu, supports the latest Polkit and comes with improvements and bug fixes to certificates enrolment.
The availability of NTS-enabled time servers allows Ubuntu 25.04 to use securely provided network time by default.
NetworkManager now includes support for wpa-psk-sha256 secured WiFi networks and allows routing-policy configuration on the backend.
Plucky Puffin is also the first release that uses Netplan and systemd-networkd's wait-online feature to check for DNS resolution, providing a more reliable way to wait for a system to be considered online.
Hardware enablement highlights
Canonical continues to enable Ubuntu across a broad range of hardware. The introduction of a new ARM64 Desktop ISO makes it easier for early adopters to install Ubuntu Desktop on ARM64 virtual machines and laptops.
Qualcomm Technologies is proud to collaborate with Canonical and is fully committed to enabling a seamless Ubuntu experience on devices powered by Snapdragon. Ubuntu's new ARM64 ISO paves the way for future Snapdragon enablement, enabling us to drive AI innovation and adoption together.", Leendert van Doorn, SVP, Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.Ubuntu 25.04 introduces full-featured support for Intel Core Ultra 200V series with built-in Intel Arc GPUs and Intel Arc B580 and B570 "Battlemage" discrete GPUs. The new additions include improved GPU and CPU ray tracing rendering performance in applications with Intel Embree support, such as Blender (v4.2+). Ray tracing hardware acceleration on the GPU improves frame rendering by 20-30%, due to a 2-4x speed-up for the ray tracing component. These GPUs now also have support enabled for hardware accelerated video encoding of AVC, JPEG, HEVC, and AV1, thus improving performance when using these formats when compared to software encoding. Developers will have access to the Intel Compute Runtime with newly introduced CCS optimizations and debugging support for Intel Xe GPUs, enabling easier development and improved AI workload speeds.
Canonical and Intel have a long-term collaboration to ensure that Intel hardware and software work seamlessly with Ubuntu, and have delivered again by enabling our best-in-class Xe2 built-in and discrete GPUs.", Hillarie Prestopine, VP and GM of GPU and System Software Engineering at Intel CorporationConfidential computing support extended to on-premises use cases
Confidential computing represents a significant paradigm shift in security architecture, protecting virtual machine workloads from unauthorized access. This technology shields sensitive code and data at runtime from privileged system software and other VMs, by operating within a hardware-protected Trusted Execution Environment, keeping data encrypted while in system memory.
Canonical has long recognized confidential computing as an area of strategic importance. Ubuntu was the first Linux distribution to support confidential VMs as a guest OS across major public cloud providers, with built-in support for AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX technologies.
Today, Canonical is pleased to announce that Ubuntu now supports AMD SEV-SNP on virtualization hosts, made possible by QEMU 9.2. This will enable enterprises to deploy confidential VMs in on-premise data centers using Ubuntu as both the host and guest operating system.
"Canonical's continued investment in confidential computing reflects the importance of protecting workloads in increasingly complex environments. With Ubuntu 25.04 now having AMD SEV-SNP host support, customers can take full advantage of AMD hardware-based security features to help isolate virtual machines, safeguard memory integrity, and reduce attack surfaces. We're proud to collaborate with Canonical to extend secure, scalable solutions across enterprise infrastructure.", Frank Gorishek, Corporate Vice President, Software Development, AMDUbuntu 25.04, codenamed "Plucky Puffin" is available to download and install from ubuntu.com/download.
23 Comments on Canonical Releases Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin
Glad to see gnome 48 and 6.14 coming to the masses though, really are a game changer for getting a turely "as intended" Wayland experience.
www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Releases-Fresher-Kernels
For such bloated packages like gnome and kde I understand the need to fix all the bugs before release.
KDE and gnome are a mess since a long time.
When your hardware is not older as 8 years you should stick to the latest kernel release from kernel.org. And not to the outdated distro kernels. 8 year old boxes are retro boxes where cpu optimisations in gcc / kernel optimisations in my point barely happens. It does not matter than to run newer "stable kernel" releases. Than you can stick to an older stable kernel branch. There are several different kernel version branches. In regards of amd processors I would say everything with ryzen in the processor name should use the 6.14 kernel branch or newer.
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/plucky-puffin-release-notes/48687
Gnome 46 is giving me headaches with remote desktop. Hoping this one works better.
Seems like a wayland issue tho. Forgot they started using it by default for Nvidia. X works fine (so far).
Found another bug with nvidia-smi. Refuses to work and hangs. Seems it has something to do with the persistence daemon. Stopping the latter makes the former work.
It's nice that they have moved the text editor's search to be more prominently visible, but couldn't they adjust the return key handling behaviour to cycle the searched query, instead of jumping back to the text field and overwriting what you have just searched for? -_-
I doubt ubuntu really thought about how hardware, especially intel and nvidia and amd graphic cards have big impacts on the hole thing.
System-d (system initialisation), now wayland (backbone for the graphical environment i think - very unprecise), pipewire vs pulseaudio vs wireplumber (audio backend - audio time critical components) . The mess keep on going. That wayland created on my custom box also issues. It is not production ready.
^ This is not 100% of what they said but it is what I remember mixed with the summery.
And I didn't realize for how long Ubuntu has been with us until I read "Pluck Puffin", which means they've almost gone through the entire alphabet. Again.
For a full picture (of sorts), see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions