The upcoming Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 25.04, is affectionately named the “Plucky Puffin” and is set to officially launch on April 17th, 2025.
This marks Canonical’s 42nd release of Ubuntu, and being an interim version, it will receive software and security updates for a duration of only nine months, concluding in January 2026. This variant is tailored for those adventurous users who prefer to explore the latest innovations at the expense of the stability typically offered by LTS releases.
Paride Legovini from the Ubuntu Release Team announced today that the six-month development cycle for Plucky Puffin has officially commenced, although the initial toolchain was made available earlier on October 17th. You can now check the release schedule if you wish to note key dates.
According to the published schedule, public beta testing for Ubuntu 25.04 is slated to begin on March 27th, 2025, with the final version set to release on April 17th, 2025. Additional important dates within the Plucky Puffin timeline include two optional Ubuntu Testing Weeks occurring on December 19th, 2024, and February 27th, 2025.
The Feature Freeze stage is scheduled for February 20th, 2025, while the Kernel Freeze and Final Freeze stages are planned for April 3rd and April 10th respectively. It is also important to highlight that Plucky Puffin will utilize -O3 optimizations for AMD64 systems.
Ubuntu 25.04 is anticipated to include the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop environment, which is set to launch on March 19th, 2025. Additionally, it will likely be supported by the Linux 6.14 kernel series, expected to be released in late March 2025, just ahead of the Plucky Puffin launch.
The release of Ubuntu 25.04 will also feature Python 3.13 and LLVM 20 as default tools, alongside GNU Binutils 2.44, along with other cutting-edge GNU/Linux technologies that will be revealed closer to the release date. For now, we are eagerly awaiting the daily build ISOs to show up on the official servers so we can test out the upcoming Plucky Puffin release.
Last updated 2 hours ago