Canonical has released Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ today. The latest interim release introduces new ‘devpacks’ for popular frameworks such as Spring, along with performance improvements for various hardware. This new release also includes GNOME 48, support for triple buffering, and revamped installation and startup processes. For developers, there are improvements in tooling and AI workloads.
Codenamed ‘Plucky Puffin’, Canonical today released the latest version of its popular Linux distribution. This interim release is right on schedule for April 17, following the beta release earlier this month. Ubuntu 25.04 focuses on developer tools and performance improvements, combined with the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment.
GNOME 48 and triple buffering
One of the most significant improvements in Plucky Puffin is the integration of GNOME 48. This new version brings several improvements to the user experience, including a ‘Preserve Battery Health’ mode that extends the life of laptop batteries by optimizing charge cycles. A new ‘Wellbeing Panel’ provides screen time tracking and helps users manage their usage habits.
The triple buffering support developed by Canonical, which provides higher performance and a smoother user experience on desktops with less rendering power, is now part of the GNOME upstream project for the first time. This benefits all users of the GNOME desktop environment. In addition, GNOME 48 now supports HDR out-of-the-box.
Plucky Puffin delivers ‘Papers’ as the new default PDF reader, offering a more modern design, improved performance, and a more user-friendly experience. Mozilla’s geolocation service has been retired, so Ubuntu 25.04 uses a new provider: BeaconDB. This offering includes automatic time zone detection, weather forecasts, and night light features in the desktop.
Linux 6.14 and improvements under the hood
The new release runs on Linux kernel 6.14, which introduces an improved scheduling system called sched_ext. This provides a mechanism for implementing scheduling policies as eBPF programs, allowing developers to outsource scheduling decisions to standard user-space programs. This enables fully functional hot-swappable Linux schedulers in any language, tool, library, or resource accessible in user space.
A new NTSYNC driver that emulates WinNT sync primitives is also available, which may improve performance for Windows games running on Wine and Proton (Steam Play). The bpftools and linux-perf tools have been decoupled from the kernel version, simplifying dependency management for developers working with containers.
The Ubuntu installation process has been improved for users who want to install Ubuntu alongside other operating systems, with advanced partitioning and encryption options. This happened to become a lot easier on Windows 11 earlier this year. There is now also better interaction with existing Windows installations with BitLocker. To improve the startup experience in future releases, Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server will include Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools. In Plucky Puffin, Dracut is available as an experimental feature.
New devpacks and toolchains for developers
Ubuntu 25.04 comes with the latest toolchains for Python, Golang, Rust, .NET, LLVM, OpenJDK, and GCC. In addition, early access upstream versions are available, such as OpenJDK 24ea, OpenJDK 25ea, and GCC 15. The .NET plugin in Snapcraft offers improvements for .Net content snaps and increases parity with MSBuild options.
Another innovation is the introduction of ‘devpacks’: Canonical is extending the availability of toolchains on Ubuntu to a wider range of development tools such as formatters and linters by delivering the latest versions in snap bundles. The first of these is ‘devpack-for-spring’, which brings the latest Spring Framework and Spring Boot projects to Ubuntu. This enables developers to more easily build and test applications with the latest Spring versions.
This focus on developer experience is in line with the trend we saw earlier with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ‘Noble Numbat’ last year, which introduced extensive support for programming languages such as Python 3.12, Ruby 3.2, and Go 1.22.
Hardware enablement and AI workloads
Canonical continues to make Ubuntu available for a wide 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.
Ubuntu 25.04 introduces full support for Intel Core Ultra 200V series with integrated Intel Arc GPUs and Intel Arc B580 and B570 GPUs. New additions include improved GPU and CPU ray tracing rendering performance in applications with Intel Embree support, such as Blender (v4.2+). Hardware acceleration for ray tracing on the GPU improves frame rendering by 20-30% thanks to a 2-4x speedup for the ray tracing component.
For confidential computing, Canonical is extending support to on-premises use cases. Ubuntu now supports AMD SEV-SNP on virtualization hosts, enabled by QEMU 9.2. This allows enterprises to deploy confidential VMs in on-premises data centers with Ubuntu as both the host and guest operating system.
Ubuntu support and update cycle
Unlike the LTS (Long Term Support) versions such as Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 25.04 is an interim release with nine months of support. For organizations that need longer support, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS remains the stable option with five years of standard support, extendable to ten years with Ubuntu Pro.
Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin is available for download now.