Ubuntu Team announced the second development release of Ubuntu 26.04, Resolute Snapshot 2, yesterday afternoon (UTC time).

The date was moved up by a week, because of end-of-year (EOY) shutdown and the developers need more time to fix issues before holidays.

Whilst the snapshot was planned for next week, we wanted to do it a week earlier so as to give ourselves some time to fix anything that might break ahead of the EOY shutdown from w/c December 22nd.

Ubuntu 26.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release with a total of 15 years support: 5-years standard support, 5-years Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM), and 5 years of security coverage (for paid customers).

The snapshot so far is still powered by Kernel 6.17 and features Gnome Desktop 49. There’s NO visual difference compare to the last snapshot release. Though, you may keep an eye on this on-going release note page for the updates.

According to the road map, Ubuntu 26.04 will have 2 new default applications: Showtime video player, and Resources system monitor and task manager.

It will continue improving the NVIDIA on Wayland experience, introduce Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM) based fingerprint authentication, add more control for TPM-backed full disk encryption (e.g., ability to add/remove PIN or passphrase after installation, re-encrypt a disk via Security Center), unified software management, and Ubuntu Pro on WSL.

And, it will sadly exclude Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Unity as the official flavors in next LTS, because the two flavors lack of maintainers and miss the deadline of LTS re-qualification.

Get Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 2

NOTE: This is a development release that’s NOT ready for production use!

The .iso images for Desktop and Server, as well as Netboot tarball, WSL, and pre-install server images are available to download via the link below:

For desktop and education users, the snapshot also includes the .iso images for all the official flavors, which are available to download via the link below:

For Ubuntu MATE and Unity, the iso images are automated builds without maintainers behind them.

• EdUbuntu 26.04.
• KUbuntu 26.04.
• LUbuntu 26.04.
• Ubuntu Budgie 26.04.
• Ubuntu MATE 26.04.
• Ubuntu Unity 26.04.
• Ubuntu Cinnamon 26.04.
• UbuntuKylin 26.04.
• Ubuntu Studio 26.04.
• XUbuntu 26.04.

If you’ve already run your machine with Ubuntu 26.04 daily build or snapshot 1, then simply install all the available updates to get to the new snapshot.

For current Ubuntu 25.10, I’ve tried to upgrade to the new 26.04 Development release by first installing all updates:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

Restart if required, then run:

do-release-upgrade -d

For future releases, see the table below or the official release schedule.