Right in the middle of a development cycle is always an interesting place to be, and that is where we find ourselves now with Ubuntu 25.04. This latest release, out on 17 April, 2025, marks the middle of the three interim releases which will lead to the next long term support (LTS) release. That one will be Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, still a year away, expected in April 2026.
The three interim releases in each cycle iteratively build up changes to be incorporated into the final LTS and Ubuntu 25.04 is no exception. While it has only a few new features that desktop users will notice, there is lots happening behind the scenes, so let’s examine both the visible and invisible.
This is the 42nd release of Ubuntu and the 16th with the current modified GNOME 3 desktop. It is also the 21st release over the past ten years with systemd as the initialization system. Despite the odd naysayer, I think it is safe to say that incorporating systemd has been a great success for Ubuntu and also for Debian upstream.
Code named Plucky Puffin, this is the second Ubuntu release that has a “P” code name. The previous one was Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin which was released on 26 April 2012, 13 years ago. With 26 letters in the English alphabet and two Ubuntu releases per year, the letters naturally repeat on a 13 year cycle.
Installation
I downloaded Ubuntu 25.04 from the official source using the Transmission BitTorrent client. As always, I carried out an SHA256 sum check to ensure that the ISO file was a good download. This is always a good practice, it only takes a minute to do and avoids potential trouble later.
This release has increased in size to 6.28 GB, which is 10% bigger than the previous one, Ubuntu 24.10, which was 5.7 GB.
I tested Ubuntu 25.04 from a USB stick, using Ventoy 1.0.99, which worked flawlessly.
System requirements
The recommended minimum system requirements for Ubuntu 25.04 have not changed over the past five years since 20.04 LTS and remain:
• 2 GHz dual-core processor • 4096 MiB RAM (system memory) for physical installs • 2048 MiB RAM for virtualised installs • 25 GB (8.6 GB for minimal) of hard-drive space (or USB stick, memory card or external drive but see LiveCD for an alternative approach) • 3D acceleration-capable GPU with at least 256 MB of VRAM • 1024×768 or higher resolution display • USB flash drive or DVD drive or for the installer media • Internet access is helpful
Overall this means that Ubuntu 25.04 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, especially if you are doing web browsing, which these days eats up a lot of RAM.
New
This release does not have a lot new that will be noticed by most desktop users, but there is much that is new behind the scenes.
Let’s start with what desktop users will see.
Ubuntu 25.04 uses the GNOME 48 desktop and that means it includes the new user “wellness” settings selector where you can choose to set alarms if you think you are getting too much screen time. You can note, however, there is no setting for “not enough screen time”.
There is also a new Preserve Battery Health setting that allows you to set laptop battery charging parameters to extend the life of your battery by not fully charging it and also slow-charging.
The GNOME 48 desktop adds Canonical-developed triple buffering patches to provide higher performance and smoothness on lower-powered devices.
The Ubuntu Flutter-based installer has been improved, especially when adding Ubuntu to a drive with a BitLocker encrypted Windows partition already installed.
The JPEG XL image format is now supported without the need for any additional packages to make it work, plus there is support for grouped system notifications.
Some of the things desktop users probably won’t notice include the new geolocation service, BeaconDB, for automatic calculation of things like time zones, weather and night light features. This replaces a discontinued Mozilla service.
This release uses Linux kernel 6.14 which is part of Ubuntu's new policy of using more recent Linux kernels for more up-to-date hardware support and to bring newer features sooner. It also employs the systemd v257.4 initialization system.
Ubuntu 25.04 introduces a new developer-aimed feature: prepackaged developer tools as Snap packages, called devpacks. The first one introduced is a new devpack-for-spring Snap with the latest Spring Framework and Spring Boot projects, including Spring Framework 6.1 and 6.2, plus Spring Boot 3.3 and 3.4. Spring devs will like this, at least.
This version also includes improved ARM architecture support, including for Snapdragon devices, with an official generic ARM64 desktop ISO. There is also new support for Intel Core Ultra 200V series processors with built-in Intel Arc GPUs and Intel Arc B580 and B570 Battlemage discrete GPUs.
There are confidential computing improvements which prevent unauthorized access to virtual machines while running.
The AppArmor security package now includes many new profiles for applications. It uses a bwrap profile (bwrap-userns-restrict) to create user namespaces and sandbox creation, before transitioning it to a tighter profile that disallows capabilities for the processes running inside the bwrap sandbox.
Initial support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) monitors has been added, although it is not enabled by default. You will need an HDR monitor to try it out, though!
Ubuntu 25.04 enables NVIDIA Dynamic Boost by default on supported laptops that have NVIDIA GPUs. This feature dynamically shifts power between the CPU and GPU depending on the system’s current workload. In gaming, this will give better performance by allowing more power to be provided to the GPU when needed.
In addition, there are many behind-the-scenes changes to packages and toolchains that most desktop users will probably not notice, including that APT 3.0 remains the default package manager for .deb packages. Other updates include: binutils 2.44, BlueZ 5.79 Bluetooth, Cairo 1.18.4, GCC 15, glibc 2.41, Golang 1.24, LLVM 20, Mesa 25.0 graphics drivers, MySQL 8.4 LTS, MySQL Shell 8.4.4, .NET 8 & 9 available, Netplan v1.1.2, NetworkManager 1.52, Nvidia 570, OpenJDK 21 with versions 24 GA and 25 early access snapshots available, OpenSSH 9.9, OpenSSL 3.4.1, PHP 8.4, PostgreSQL 17, Poppler 25.03 PDF rendering, Python 3.13.3, QEMU 9.2.0 machine emulator and virtualizer, Rust 1.84, Samba 4.21, Squid 6.13, SSSD 2.10.1, Valkey 8.0.2 and xdg-desktop-portal 1.20.
Settings
Since this release is code-named Plucky Puffin, it comes with a new puffin-themed light wallpaper, which changes to a dark wallpaper when the window color theme is changed from light to dark. There are a total of 11 wallpapers provided, six of which are puffin-themed. I have to note that all of the provided wallpapers are quite beautifully done and elegant. Not all Linux distributions can make that same claim, as there have been some scary-looking ones elsewhere recently.
As in recent releases, Ubuntu 25.04 continues to offer just two window themes, light and dark, although these can be customized with a choice of ten system highlight colors.
Here is an Ubuntu settings tip: some people like Ubuntu overall but don't like the Ubuntu dock (launcher) taking up valuable screen space. The dock is actually very easy to disable which returns it to the bottom of the workspace “switcher“ page, like a vanilla GNOME desktop. To do this, just install the GNOME Shell Extensions package via:
$ sudo apt install gnome-shell-extensions
Then open the extensions controller from the main menu, select “Ubuntu Dock - off” and it is gone. It can be re-enabled from the same interface at any time if you want it back. You can note that any plugged-in drives, plus the trash icon, which would normally appear on the dock do not appear on the switcher page dock but can be found on the GNOME Files (nautilus) file manager sidebar instead.
Applications
As in recent Ubuntu releases, if you install the Ubuntu default minimal installation you will get only Firefox, Nautilus, GNOME Text Editor and not much more, although any desired applications can easily be added from the repositories. The ISO file comes with the extended selection of applications on it, though, in case you would rather do the full installation. The live session boots up to the extended selection, so you can at least see what it looks like with everything installed. The choice between the two installation options is really a trade-off between spending your time adding the applications that you do want, versus removing ones you don't want.
My personal choice would be to go for the default minimal installation and then use a checklist to add what I want, using APT from the command line, as it can be done in a single command, if you are organized.
Some of the applications included with the full 25.04 extended selection installation are:
Archive Manager (file-roller) 44.5 file archiver Deja Dup 45.2 file back-ups* Firefox 137.0.2 web browser GNOME Calendar 48.1 desktop calendar GNOME Clocks 48.0 clocks GNOME Disks 46.1 disk manager* GNOME Document Scanner (simple-scan) 46.0 optical scanner* GNOME Document Viewer (papers) 48.0 PDF viewer GNOME Files (nautilus) 48.0 file manager GNOME Image Viewer (Eye of Gnome) 47.0 image viewer* GNOME Snapshot 47 beta webcam application* GNOME Terminal 3.56.0 terminal emulator GNOME Text Editor 48.2 text editor GNOME Videos (totem) 43.1 movie player Gparted 1.6.0 partition editor* LibreOffice 25.2.2.2 office suite, less LibreOffice Base PipeWire 1.2.7 audio controller Remmina 1.4.39 remote desktop client Rhythmbox 3.4.8 music player Security Center (desktop-security-center) 0+git.f7ad73a security controller Shotwell 0.32.10 photo manager Startup Disk Creator (usb-creator-gtk) 0.4.1 USB ISO writer Thunderbird 128.9.1 ESR email client Transmission 4.0.6 bittorrent client* Ubuntu App Center 1.0.0 package management system Wget 1.25.5 command line webpage downloader * indicates same application version as used in Ubuntu 24.10 supplied as a Snap, so the version depends on the upstream package manager *** indicates included on the ISO for boot-up, but not included in a full installation
As can be seen from the list, the application collection provided is a mix of GNOME versions, this time mostly from GNOME 48, with a few holdovers from GNOME 43, 46 and 47.
The only change to the suite of applications this time around is the substitute of GNOME Papers replacing Evince as the default PDF viewer. Papers is actually a recent fork of Evince but it uses the GTK4 toolkit and is also partially written in the Rust programming language. In testing it, it works fine, as it displays PDFs! You can note that GNOME brands it as “Document Viewer” just like they did with Evince.
In the way of application improvements, GNOME Camera can now scan QR codes, GNOME Calendar has speed improvements and GNOME Text Editor has a streamlined header bar with a single options menu.
Conclusion
These days users expect all new Ubuntu releases to be solid and simple, with no obvious flaws. Ubuntu 25.04 delivers on all those points.
The next release will be the last of the three interim releases of this development cycle. Ubuntu 25.10 is due out 9 October, 2025 and should bring the last of any expected changes to be incorporated in the next LTS which will be Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, due out in April 2026.
External links
Official website: https://ubuntu.com/