Canonical has announced the arrival of Ubuntu 25.04 — “Plucky Puffin.” This latest interim release introduces a number of updates across the desktop, as well as developer tools, and improved hardware support, with a focus on boosting performance and improving the user experience.
Ubuntu 25.04 ships with GNOME 48, offering new features like a Preserve Battery Health mode, HDR support, and Canonical’s triple buffering patches, now accepted upstream. A new Wellbeing Panel helps users manage screen time, while a redesigned install and boot experience adds improved partitioning options and experimental Dracut support for faster system startup.
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“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.”
For developers, Ubuntu 25.04 introduces “devpacks,” snap bundles that offer easy access to the latest frameworks and tools. The first devpack focuses on the Spring Framework, giving developers an easier way to work with Spring Framework 6.1, 6.2, and Spring Boot 3.3 and 3.4 projects. Additional toolchains such as updated Python, Golang, Rust, .NET, and GCC releases are also included.
Ubuntu 25.04 introduces a new ARM64 Desktop ISO to simplify installation on ARM laptops and virtual machines. Qualcomm naturally welcomed the move, with Leendert van Doorn, SVP at Qualcomm Technologies, saying, “Ubuntu’s new ARM64 ISO paves the way for future Snapdragon enablement, enabling us to drive AI innovation and adoption together.”
On the hardware side, support for Intel’s new Core Ultra 200V series and Battlemage discrete GPUs brings ray tracing and hardware-accelerated video encoding to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 25.04 is available for download now.
