Canonical has officially released Ubuntu 25.04, named “Plucky Puffin,” bring a host of new features and improvements to the interim release.

Canonical has two separate release cycles for Ubuntu, a long-term support (LTS) release that comes out in April of even-numbered years, and interim releases that come out every six months, in April of odd-numbered years and every October. While the LTS releases are carefully curated to ensure maximum reliability for enterprise customers, Ubuntu interim releases often contain more big changes and innovations, many of which make it into later LTS releases.

“Plucky Puffin combines the very latest in open source desktop technology with a focus on making high quality developer tooling readily available on Ubuntu,” said Jon Seager, VP of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical. “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.”

Gnome 48

True to form, Ubuntu 25.04 brings a number of significant upgrades, not the least of which is Gnome 48.

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.

Linux Kernel 6.14

Plucky Puffin also includes Linux 6.14 kernel, following through on the company’s change of strategy with how it bundles the Linux kernel. In the past, the company would wait at least a month after a new kernel version was released before including it in a new version of Ubuntu. In August 2024, Canonical announced it would switch to using whatever kernel was available at the time of a new Ubuntu release.

The intent behind this post is to describe a new policy the CKT is taking in regards to kernel version selection for an upcoming Ubuntu release. To provide users with the absolute latest in features and hardware support, Ubuntu will now ship the absolute latest available version of the upstream Linux kernel at the specified Ubuntu release freeze date, even if upstream is still in Release Candidate (RC) status.

Linux kernel 6.14 brings a umber of improvements.

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.

Confidential Computing Improvements

Canonical has greatly improved Ubuntu’s confidential computing capability, now supporting on-premise VMs.

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.

Development Tools and Devpaks

Ubuntu 25.04 includes improvements to popular toolchains for developers.

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.

The company is also broadening its toolchain availability to include formatters and linters, “delivering the latest versions in snap bundles known as ‘devpacks.'”

Misc Changes

Plucky Puffin brings a number of additional changes, including improvements to the installer, which gives users the ability to interact with Windows BitLocker-enabled installations.

The update also includes network improvements, as well as “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.”

Ubuntu 25.04 builds on the distro’s already industry-leading hardware support, adding a new ARM64 Desktop ISO, as well as “support for Intel® Core™ Ultra 200V series with built-in Intel® Arc™ GPUs and Intel® Arc™ B580 and B570 “Battlemage” discrete GPUs.”

“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,” said Hillarie Prestopine, VP and GM of GPU and System Software Engineering at Intel Corporation.

Conclusion

Ubuntu is the world’s most popular Linux distro, and with good reason. Canonical continues to deliver a product that is equally at home on the server or desktop. Ubuntu 25.04 builds on that success, bringing a host of new features and quality-of-life improvements that will benefits the entire user base.