The Ubuntu team announced the Beta release of Ubuntu 25.04, code-name Plucky Puffin, on Mar 27.

The final release of Ubuntu 25.04 is expected on April 17, 2025. It’s a short term release with 9-month support until Jan 2026.

The new release features Linux 6.14, the latest Kernel that was released a few days ago.

The new kernel has new hardware support and updated drivers, including THC driver for handling touchscreen/touchpad in modern Intel laptops, NTSYNC driver for better performance playing Windows games through Wine or Steam Play, Microsoft “Copilot” key support, better Dell XPS-13 support. See HERE for more about new kernel.

The default desktop in the release is GNOME 48 that was release in last week.

The new desktop introduced a “Wellbeing” setting page, allowing to monitor and limit screen time usage, new toggle option to enable HDR, as well as a battery charge limit option for PC/laptop that support the feature.

Other desktop features include dynamic triple buffering with significantly improved desktop performance, global shortcuts, center new windows by default, and new gdctl utility to show/set display configuration. See GNOME 48 release note for more about the new desktop.

Screen time monitor/limit setting page

Ubuntu does NOT use vanilla GNOME. 25.04 replaced Evince with Papers as default document viewer for viewing PDF files, introduced xdg-terminal-exec to switch user’s default terminal, and geolocation services are now backed by BeaconDB 5 after Mozilla Location Services was retired last year.

The Desktop installer has also been updated with option to replace an existing Ubuntu installation, and dual boot with BitLocker protected Windows systems while offering encryption and advanced options.

Other changes in Ubuntu 25.04 Beta include:

• Systemd v257.4, but built without utmp support.
• Netplan v1.1.2 with support for wpa-psk-sha256 WiFis, allowing to configure routing-policy on the NetworkManager backend.
• Firefox 136, Thunderbird 128, LibreOffice 25.2, Fish shell 4.0, and GIMP 3.0.
• Toolkit updates: GCC 14.2, binutils 2.44, glibc 2.41. Python 3.13.2, LLVM 20, Rust 1.84, Golang 1.24, OpenJDK 24 GA and 25 EA
• And more, see the release note for details.

Download or Upgrade to Ubuntu 25.04:

Ubuntu 25.04 desktop, server, netboot and WSL images are available to download at the link below:

While there are also official flavors with different desktop environment, e.g., KUbuntu 25.04, XUbuntu 25.04, Ubuntu MATE 25.04, and more, available to download in their own websites, or through this cdimage.ubuntu.com page.

For Ubuntu 24.10 users, there’s also an official guide shows how to upgrade to the new Beta.