Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Every two years, there’s a day that is something like Christmas for Ubuntu users, and 25 April, 2024 was that day. That was the release date for the new Ubuntu long term support (LTS) version, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. This is a big deal because most Ubuntu users don’t use the three interim releases in between LTS versions, opting for the more polished LTS with its longer support period.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the 40th release of Ubuntu and the 14th with its modified GNOME 3 desktop. While the interim releases of Ubuntu are supported for only nine months, this LTS comes with five years of support. In addition, there are five additional years of support available through Ubuntu Pro, and enterprise users can also buy two further years of support, meaning you could still be running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in 2036!
While the first two releases in this development cycle brought only a few small changes, the last interim release, 23.10, and this LTS, introduced a lot more. The changes are mostly behind-the-scenes, hidden from the average user.
Because Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is codenamed Noble Numbat, the obvious question is “what on earth is a numbat?” It turns out that it is a bug-eating Australian marsupial. And, no, it does not have wings; it is not that sort of bat. Numbats show up on the official release wallpaper, as a decorative element on a noble crown and are also featured on two more of the 13 provided wallpapers.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is actually the second Ubuntu release to carry a codename beginning with “N”, the earlier one being Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal, from April 2011. Because there are 26 letters in the English alphabet and there are two Ubuntu releases per calendar year, the letters naturally recur every 13 years.
Installation
I got my copy of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ISO file from the official source via BitTorrent, using Transmission to download it. Once the file had arrived, I carried out an SHA256 sum check on it to make sure the download was good.
The official release notes claim that there has been “a 200MB reduction in image size”, but that does not fit the facts. In this case, the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ISO file I got was 6.1 GB, making it 17% bigger than the Ubuntu 23.10 ISO file, which was 5.2 GB. Ubuntu has now more than doubled its ISO file size in the two and a half years since Ubuntu 21.10 came out. That release was 2.9 GB. It is not really clear where all this extra bloat has come from.
I tested this release using Ventoy 1.0.97. Ubuntu is officially listed as being supported by Ventoy and it booted up nicely.
Anyone running Ubuntu 23.10 should have received a notice for an upgrade via the Software Updater shortly after the release date. Users with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will get an upgrade notice only after the 24.04.1 point release is out, currently expected on 15 August, 2024. Those users can force an upgrade from the command line sooner, but just know that that method will not be fully tested before 24.04.1 is out, so there are risks involved. Of course, you can always just do a fresh installation of 24.04 LTS at any time.
System requirements
The recommended minimum system requirements for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS have not changed in the last four years since 20.04 LTS came out and remain: 2 GHz dual core processor 4 GB RAM 25 GB of hard-drive, USB stick, memory card or external drive space Screen capable of 1024 × 768 pixel screen resolution Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for the installation media Internet access useful but not essential
This means that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS should run fine on hardware designed for Windows 7 or later, although I would suggest at least 8 GB of RAM as a working minimum.
New
As I noted, there are a few new things that desktop users will notice and many more hidden updates behind-the-scenes.
Noticeable will be the introduction of the GNOME 46.0 desktop which includes updated application versions, many of which now use libadwaita and GTK4. Not all the included GNOME applications are from version 46, though.
For fresh installations, the Ubuntu installer has been improved including reintroducing the option of using a ZFS file system, as well as TPM full-disk encryption. The Power Profiles Manager has been improved to better support newer hardware and is now “battery-aware”, automatically increasing the optimization levels when running on battery power. For devices with fingerprint capabilities, fprintd has been updated and libfprint supports many new fingerprint drivers and devices. There is also a new version of the Flutter-based Ubuntu App Center introduced in Ubuntu 23.10 and which replaced the old Snap Store.
Also, for a webcam application, GNOME Snapshot replaces Cheese which had been included in Ubuntu for many years.
The Ubuntu family of fonts, which are used by default across Ubuntu as its system fonts, have been updated and are now slimmer and sharper. If you don’t like them, there is a procedure to revert to the old versions outlined in the 24.04 release notes.
Ubuntu now supports the HEIF and HEIC photo formats commonly used on cell phones, plus games will run better due to an increase in the virtual memory mapping limit. Ironically, to save space, Ubuntu now no longer comes with any games so you will have to install your own from the repositories.
There are also many behind-the-scenes changes that most desktop users will probably not notice, including the resolution of the famous Y2K Mark II bug, the “year 2038 problem”. When nothing happens in 2038, that will be it!
There are many toolchain updates: binutils 2.42, BlueZ 5.72, Cairo 1.18, GCC 14, glibc 2.39, Golang 1.22, LLVM 18, .NET 8, Netplan v1.0, NetworkManager 1.46, and OpenJDK 21 is the now the default while support includes versions 17, 11 and 8. Also updated are Poppler 24.02, Python 3.12, xdg-desktop-portal 1.18, and Rust 1.75. Audio is now provided by Pipewire 1.0.4.
The initialization system is updated to systemd v255.4. Systemd is also now enabled by default for all uses, even when an instance is launched directly from a terminal window with the wsl.exe command or from an imported root files system.
This time around, the Linux kernel is version 6.8 which includes better support for Intel Meteor Lake CPUs, support for Nintendo Switch Online controllers, fixes the wifi issues seen on some AMD laptops, and improves the behavior of zswap. It also has improved syscall performance, nested KVM support on ppc64el, and access to the new bcachefs filesystem.
Apport now has integration with systemd-coredump to handle crashes.
For security, in combination with the apparmor package, the Ubuntu kernel now restricts the use of unprivileged user namespaces. TLS 1.0, 1.1 and DTLS 1.0 are now considered obsolete and have been disabled. There is more consistent application of openssl and gnutls system configurations and pptpd has been removed. Openssh in Ubuntu no longer uses libsystemd, due to the infamous XZ-utils backdoor.
GCC compiler 20 and dpkg now default to -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 instead of -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 to increase buffer overflow detection and mitigation. Dpkg now defaults to -mbranch-protection=standard – which should mitigate code-reuse attacks on the arm64 architecture.
The tzdata (time zone data) package was split into tzdata, tzdata-icu, and tzdata-legacy.
Many more similar sorts of small changes are also incorporated.
For the average desktop user, most of these changes are positive updates, if largely invisible, with one possible exception. Due to a bug, the Ubuntu app-center will not install randomly downloaded .deb files, and this has generated loud complaints from some people in the tech media. These files can still be installed using gdebi graphically, or from the command line, as long as they comply with the changes incorporated in the unprivileged user namespaces security upgrade. Many of these sorts of download applications, like the proprietary Zoom video conferencing client for Linux for instance, are already available as snap packages so do check there first before complaining.
Settings
As in recent releases, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has only two window themes: standard (light) and dark. With the default wallpaper in use, switching to the dark window theme also switches the wallpaper to a dark version. Overall, that makes the display so dark it is hard to discern the edges of the windows in use. It is like your Ubuntu desktop fell into a black hole. A lighter-colored wallpaper actually works better with the dark window theme.
Applications
As with Ubuntu 23.10, the 24.04 LTS ISO file boots up to a live session using the extended selection installation and not the minimal default installation. This, once again, means that the full suite of applications is present in the ISO but does not install under the default installation. As I noted last time, this means you still get a huge ISO file download for a minimal installation, which seems like a bad compromise. Some other Ubuntu flavors, like Xubuntu, have separate ISO downloads for its regular and minimal installations, which seems like a more sensible solution.
Some of the applications included with 24.04 LTS extended selection installation are: Archive Manager (file-roller) 44.1 file archiver Deja Dup 45.2 file back-ups Firefox 125.0.2 web browser GNOME Calendar 46.0 desktop calendar GNOME Clocks 46.0 clocks GNOME Disks 46.0 disk manager GNOME Document Scanner (simple-scan) 46.0 optical scanner GNOME Document Viewer (evince) 46.0 PDF viewer GNOME Files (nautilus) 46.0 file manager GNOME Image Viewer (Eye of Gnome) 45.3 image viewer GNOME Snapshot 46.2 webcam application GNOME Terminal 3.52.0 terminal emulator GNOME Text Editor 46.1 text editor GNOME Videos (totem) 43.0 movie player* Gparted 1.5.0 partition editor* LibreOffice 24.2.2 office suite, less LibreOffice Base PipeWire 1.0.4 audio controller Remmina 1.4.35 remote desktop client Rhythmbox 3.4.7 music player* Shotwell 0.32.6 photo manager Startup Disk Creator 0.3.17 (usb-creator-gtk) USB ISO writer* Systemd 255.4 init system Thunderbird 115.10.1 email client Transmission 4.0.5 bittorrent client Ubuntu App Center 1.0.0 package management system Wget 1.21.4 command line webpage downloader
* indicates same application version used in Ubuntu 23.10 supplied as a snap so version depends on the upstream package manager * indicates included on the ISO for boot-up but not included in a full installation
If you install the new default minimal installation, you will get Firefox, Nautilus, GNOME Text Editor, and not much more, although any desired applications can easily be added from the repositories using the Ubuntu App Center or the command line.
This time, the application collection is a mix of GNOME versions, mostly from GNOME 46, but with a few GNOME 43 and 44 holdovers. As mentioned above, the swapping of Gnome Snapshot for the old Cheese webcam application is the only change to the suite of default applications.
As in the past, the default email client remains Mozilla Thunderbird, but it is now included as a snap package instead of a .deb, making support easier for Mozilla and providing more timely updates. I am sure there will be complaints.
While the App Center replaced the old Snap Store starting with Ubuntu 23.10, it took me some digging to figure out how it was installed. It turns out that it is a snap package but, even though it is developed with the package name of app-center, it is installed as snap-store, the same name used by the old package. While it is a bit confusing, at least the mystery has been solved.
The GNOME Files 46.0 (Nautilus) file manager has some fixes. The file transfer dialogues are moved to the bottom left of the window and no longer obscure the tabs, a definite improvement. It also has new file search capabilities, the path box can now be edited, custom folders can be more easily reset and there is a new option to both display file and folder timestamps.
Conclusions
Overall, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS seems like a good, solid release. These days the emphasis at Canonical is on enterprise or business use, so Ubuntu 24.04 LTS looks like a polished and professional operating system that would be at home in a corporate HQ or a doctor’s office. I am sure that its clean and serious look adds to its user appeal these days. If you want an operating system that barks when you boot it up then try Puppy Linux instead.
The next release will be Ubuntu 24.10, codenamed Oracular Oriole, expected in October, 2024. This will be the first interim release in the new development cycle that will lead to the next LTS, which will be Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, due out in April, 2026.
It is interesting to note that when Ubuntu 24.10 comes out that it will mark 20 years of Ubuntu. The very first release was Ubuntu 4.10, Warty Warthog, on 20 October, 2004. Ubuntu has shown some serious staying power over the past two decades!
External links
Official website: https://ubuntu.com/