Canonical Releases Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin

[Nomad76]

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.

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 Corporation

Confidential 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, AMD

Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed "Plucky Puffin" is available to download and install from ubuntu.com/download.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Arrakis9]

Sure took them long enough. I got tired of waiting and switched to Arch on my laptop. BTW I use Arch

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.

 

[Easo]

Sure took them long enough. I got tired of waiting and switched to Arch on my laptop. BTW I use Arch

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.

What do you mean by took them long enough? They pretty much release at the same months, always, April and October.

 

[R-T-B]

What do you mean by took them long enough? They pretty much release at the same months, always, April and October.

I'm pretty sure he just means other distros released these updates faster, which has it's pros and cons, obviously.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I think Ubuntu tries to be a step or two behind for the sake of maturity and stability, since they tend to be one of the more well-known Linux solutions. You can always force newer kernels if you know what you’re doing.

 

[Solaris17]

I think Ubuntu tries to be a step or two behind for the sake of maturity and stability, since they tend to be one of the more well-known Linux solutions. You can always force newer kernels if you know what you’re doing.

Ubuntu isn't a rolling release; and is always ahead of debian and mint. Unless its a one off weird specialty distro based on debian, Ubuntu is generally the forefront of debian based systems.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Ubuntu isn't a rolling release; and is always ahead of debian and mint. Unless it’s a one off weird specialty distro based on debian, Ubuntu is generally the forefront of debian based systems.

Mint just pulls from Ubuntu, IIRC. And I stand corrected. Canonical appears to have shifted to faster kernel adoption, making this release in step with the latest kernel release. Used to be you were a few kernels behind.

 

[Solaris17]

Used to be you were a few kernels behind.

yeah I want to say it was that way all the way up to 6.0 but I dont remember tbh. Either way, this is a great release. I'v been excited about 6.x its been really great for hardware all around!

 

[igormp]

Mint just pulls from Ubuntu, IIRC. And I stand corrected. Canonical appears to have shifted to faster kernel adoption, making this release in step with the latest kernel release. Used to be you were a few kernels behind.

That's something recent-ish:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Releases-Fresher-Kernels

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

That's something recent-ish:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Releases-Fresher-Kernels

It’s a logical move, TBH, as Intel and AMD are active contributors these days, and the newest kernels can offer significant improvements.

 

[MCJAxolotl7]

Ubuntu isn't a rolling release; and is always ahead of debian and mint. Unless its a one off weird specialty distro based on debian, Ubuntu is generally the forefront of debian based systems.

Debian Sid exists

 

[_roman_]

Glad to see gnome 48 and 6.14 coming to the masses though

Where is the problem to have a new kernel? In the past i compiled at least 4 kernel per week. Next reboot is with the new kernel.

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.

Plucky Puffin Release Notes

Plucky Puffin Release Notes Dedication Subscribers to the ubuntu-{devel-}announce mailing list and long term participants in the Ubuntu community will have come across Steve Langasek’s work. Steve, known in the community as vorlon, was a long-term member of the Release team (along with being a...

discourse.ubuntu.com

 

[Shihab]

Feeling adventurous. Going to install it on my main PC tonight. Someone stop me!

Gnome 46 is giving me headaches with remote desktop. Hoping this one works better.

 

[tommo1982]

Whatever one may think, Canonical was one of the best things that happened to Linux in recent years. So many distros are based on their work, including Mint, which I use.

 

[Shihab]

Lol! Immediatly post-install, opening settings and navigating to sharing settings breaks it!
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? -_-

 

[_roman_]

Thanks for sharing. That is the point why i configure everything myself. So I know how the packages interact with each other. In the long run I saved a lot of time.

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.

 

[SomeOne99h]

Mint just pulls from Ubuntu, IIRC. And I stand corrected. Canonical appears to have shifted to faster kernel adoption, making this release in step with the latest kernel release. Used to be you were a few kernels behind.

yeah I want to say it was that way all the way up to 6.0 but I dont remember tbh. Either way, this is a great release. I'v been excited about 6.x its been really great for hardware all around!

I have heard an announcement from them some time ago, "We didn't like how people buys new laptop and then when they install Ubuntu, it doesn't work well for them. We want to deliver a good experience for users. It is about time to change our ways with how we handle the the kernels"
^ This is not 100% of what they said but it is what I remember mixed with the summery.

 

[Arrakis9]

Where is the problem to have a new kernel? In the past i compiled at least 4 kernel per week. Next reboot is with the new kernel.

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.

Plucky Puffin Release Notes

Plucky Puffin Release Notes Dedication Subscribers to the ubuntu-{devel-}announce mailing list and long term participants in the Ubuntu community will have come across Steve Langasek’s work. Steve, known in the community as vorlon, was a long-term member of the Release team (along with being a...

discourse.ubuntu.com

NTSYNC, triple buffering, better scheduling for modern processors, they finally fixed that stupid refresh rate bug with HDMI out on dual gpu laptops... its a great update, did you read the news post or check out the patch notes?

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I have heard an announcement from them some time ago, "We didn't like how people buys new laptop and then when they install Ubuntu, it doesn't work well for them. We want to deliver a good experience for users. It is about time to change our ways with how we handle the the kernels"
^ This is not 100% of what they said but it is what I remember mixed with the summery.

Yeah, I can specifically recall having those kinds of issues in the past, installing Ubuntu on a laptop and something doesn't work. Updated the kernel and it clears it right up.

 

[Athlonite]

Whatever one may think, Canonical was one of the best things that happened to Linux in recent years. So many distros are based on their work, including Mint, which I use.

Mint debian edition is alot better than the ubuntu edition

 

[bug]

Sure took them long enough. I got tired of waiting and switched to Arch on my laptop. BTW I use Arch

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.

Not Ubuntu's problem though, you were just using the wrong distro, considering the expectations.

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.

 

[tommo1982]

Mint debian edition is alot better than the ubuntu edition

Agreed. I tried a few and I found Mint to be the best, for me at least. I like Gnome based interface. It's somewhere between richness of KDE and XFCE's simplicity.

Not Ubuntu's problem though, you were just using the wrong distro, considering the expectations.

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.

One doesn't know how ubiquitous Ubuntu is, until you check how many distros are based on their repositories. Hence I say, Ubuntu was Microsoft for Linux.

 

[bug]

One doesn't know how ubiquitous Ubuntu is, until you check how many distros are based on their repositories. Hence I say, Ubuntu was Microsoft for Linux.

One could argue Debian is even more ubiquitous, since Ubuntu is based on Debian.

For a full picture (of sorts), see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions

 

[Athlonite]

Hence I say, Ubuntu was Microsoft for Linux.

Yeah Ubuntu may have started out wanting to be a Linux replacement for Windows but somewhere along the way they've gone of someplace sideways like woman telling a story