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Review – Ubuntu Unity 25.04

by Adam Hunt

Lots of people enjoy mystery stories, the type of novel where as a reader you try to figure out what’s going on before the book ends and the author reveals all. I even admit to reading some novels like that myself from time to time.

But recently, I ran into a bigger mystery. The release announcement for Ubuntu Unity 25.04 presented a real conundrum. It has some bug details, how-to-upgrade instructions, lots of “credits” and “thank-yous” and even a plug for the official merchandise shop (did you know they are selling towels now? Wow...) but no information on what is actually new in this release. That seemed odd. It was a mystery which begged solving through old fashioned gumshoe sleuthing. Time to hit the streets.

Ubuntu Unity 25.04 is the middle one of three interim releases which make up this development cycle. That is a cycle which will eventually result in the next long term support (LTS) version, Ubuntu Unity 26.04 LTS, due out in April 2026.

Arriving on 17 April 2025, Ubuntu Unity 25.04 is this distribution's 11th release. As it is an interim release, it is supported for nine months, until January 2026.

The last two releases, 24.04 LTS and 24.10, introduced very little that was new. That seemed to indicate that as of 2024 at least, the developers had Ubuntu Unity just about where they wanted it. Much of their effort in that year was reported to be on Ubuntu Lomiri, a test and development project using the Lomiri (Unity 8) desktop in an attempt to get Ubuntu Unity ready for the switch to a Wayland display server environment from its current X11.

But what about Ubuntu Unity 25.04? I had to find out the hard way….

Installation

I downloaded the Ubuntu Unity 25.04 ISO file from the official source via BitTorrent, using Transmission. With the file downloaded, I ran the usual command line SHA256 sum check to verify it was good. It was good... nothing suspicious there.

I rang up a live session, using a USB stick equipped with Ventoy 1.1.05. Even though it is still not officially listed as supported by Ventoy, being Ubuntu-based it works fine. From experience, that was expected.

The Ubuntu Unity 25.04 ISO file is a 3.8 GB download, 100 MB bigger than the last release. Was that from new features or just inherited from Ubuntu backend bloat? The mystery deepened.

System requirements

Ubuntu Unity does not specify any system requirements and never has done, but it is probably safe to assume that it is the same as Ubuntu 25.04, a minimum of:

2 GHz dual core processor
4 GB of RAM

New

As I noted, the release announcement has nothing to say about what is new. Was this just an oversight or are they hiding something? I got deep into the menus, settings, and applications, running comparisons against 24.10.

What I discovered was that not much has changed.

I did find some new things inherited from Ubuntu upstream. As with all the other Ubuntu 25.04 flavors, Ubuntu Unity 25.04 uses the 6.14 version of the Linux kernel and that includes new hardware support. The initialization system has also been upgraded to systemd 257.4. That was no surprise, though, as Ubuntu Unity has been using systemd since its inception with no noted issues.

Settings

I found no changes in the settings locations or the offerings there. Ubuntu Unity continues to have its settings spread out between the regular settings menu, the panel brush icon and the included Unity Tweak Tool. Once you find them all, they work just fine.

The regular settings menu provides only two window themes, Yaru and Yaru-dark, while the Unity Tweak Tool offers a choice of four window themes: Ambiance, Radiance, Yaru and Yaru-dark, plus 37 icon themes and seven cursor styles. The settings menu has 16 accent colors and the brush icon has ten. Nothing new there.

I did find that there is new wallpaper. Not totally unexpected, as this release is code named "Plucky Puffin", it is a fresh and very dark purple, puffin-themed wallpaper. As well, there are 14 other wallpapers, nine of which have puffins on them. All of them are quite well rendered, in fact they are some of Ubuntu Unity’s best wallpapers to date.

While the mainstream Ubuntu has only very limited theme and color choices, Ubuntu Unity provides its users with a wide range of customization options.

Applications

Some of the applications included with Ubuntu Unity 25.04 are:

Archive Manager (File Roller) 44.5 file archiver
Atril 1.26.2 PDF viewer*
Cheese 44.1 webcam application*
CUPS 2.4.12 printing system
Document Scanner (Simple Scan) 46.0 optical scanner*
Firefox 137.0.2 web browser**
GDebi 0.9.5.8 .deb package installer
Gnome Disks 46.1 disk manager*
Gnome Screenshot 41.0 screenshot tool*
Gnome Terminal 3.56.0 terminal emulator
Gparted 1.6.0 partition editor
Image Viewer (Eye of MATE) 1.26.1 image viewer*
LibreOffice 25.2.2.2 office suite
Mate Calculator 1.26.0 calculator*
Nemo 6.4.5 file manager
Pluma 1.26.1 text editor*
PulseAudio 17.0 audio controller
Remmina 1.4.39 remote desktop client
Rhythmbox 3.4.8 music player
Shotwell 0.32.10 photo manager
Stacer 1.1.0 system monitor*
Startup Disk Creator 0.4.1 USB ISO writer
Synaptic 0.91.5 package management system
Systemd 257.4 init system
Transmission 4.0.6 bit torrent client*
Unity 7.7.0 interface*
Unity Tweak Tool 0.0.7 settings manager*
VLC 3.0.21 media player*
XTerm 397-1 terminal emulator

* indicates same application version as used in Ubuntu Unity 24.10
** supplied as a snap, so version depends on the upstream package manager

Some of the default applications have received updated versions, although the mix of applications itself has not changed.

The file manager remains the Cinnamon desktop's Nemo, although updated to version 6.4.5. Nemo is a fork of Nautilus (GNOME Files) from version 3.4. That was before version 3.6 removed a lot of user options and functionality from Nautilus. Nemo works quite well and has a wide choice of user customization settings, but still lacks bulk file renaming in this implementation so installing a stand-alone bulk file renamer like GPRename is a good idea.

In this release, by default Ubuntu Unity's Nemo file manager does not display the menu bar, making it impossible to customize it like that. Hitting "alt+v" displays the Nemo menu on the top panel as a "global menu", which then can be selected to stay permanently displayed at View - Menubar.

LibreOffice 25.2.2.2 is supplied complete, except for LibreOffice Base, the database application, which can be installed from the Ubuntu repositories if needed.

The applications provided are pretty complete for most desktop user’s needs.

Conclusions

So...I think this mystery is solved. What the release announcement is really telling us is that, even though Ubuntu Unity 25.04 is a pretty flawless release with a few new puffin wallpapers and some updated application versions, it has very little else new that is worth mentioning, so they didn’t. Users may want to wait for the LTS to upgrade, unless they have new hardware requiring a new Linux kernel.

We will see what turns up in the next release, Ubuntu Unity 25.10, due out on 09 October 2025. It will be the last interim release before the next LTS appears in April, 2026.

And as for when Wayland will land in Ubuntu Unity, well that is still a mystery….

External links

Official website: https://ubuntuunity.org/

Biography:

Adam Hunt started using Ubuntu in 2007. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in a house with no Windows.