Ubuntu 25.04 now available with GNOME 48 and Linux kernel 6.14

Canonical has just released Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed Plucky Puffin, for the general public. This is a stable release, but not a long-term support version, so it’s only going to be alive for 9 months before support is dropped. These non-LTS releases are great for people who want a stable experience, but also want to try cutting-edge features.

The key highlight in this update is GNOME 48, which brings with it notification stacking, digital well-being settings, triple buffering patches for smoother performance (which Canonical contributed), and more. This version of Ubuntu also includes an app called Papers, a PDF reader for a more modern and user-friendly experience.

To help support timezone detection, weather forecasts, and night light features on the desktop, Ubuntu 25.04 ships with the BeaconDB geolocation service. Canonical made this change because Mozilla retired its geolocation service, which had previously been relied upon.

Another big change in this update is the inclusion of Linux 6.14. Canonical said that it includes a new NTSYNC driver that emulates WinNT sync primitives, enabling better performance potential for Windows games running on WINE and Proton (Steam Play). Canonical also said:

“Kernel developers can now make use of a new scheduling system, sched_ext, which provides a mechanism to implement scheduling policies as eBPF programs. This enables developers to defer scheduling decisions to standard user-space programs and implement fully functional hot-swappable Linux schedulers, using any language, tool, library, or resource accessible in user-space.”

In terms of hardware support, Canonical has made a new ISO image available with 25.04 that enables it to work on ARM64 devices, and Qualcomm has said this paves the way for Ubuntu to eventually run on Snapdragon chips. Ubuntu 25.04 also brings full-featured support for the Intel Core Ultra 200V series with built-in Arc GPUs and Intel Arc B580 and B570 "Battlemage" discrete GPUs, Canonical said:

“The new additions include improved GPU and CPU ray tracing rendering performance in applications with Intel Embree support, such as Blender (v4.2+). Ray tracing hardware acceleration on the GPU improves frame rendering by 20-30%, due to a 2-4x speed-up for the ray tracing component. These GPUs now also have support enabled for hardware accelerated video encoding of AVC, JPEG, HEVC, and AV1, thus improving performance when using these formats when compared to software encoding.”

The new update is available for download now on Ubuntu.com. If you have Ubuntu installed already, you can upgrade to this version, too. If you are on an LTS release and want to upgrade, you’ll need to take extra steps outlined here.

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