Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) Now Available, This Is What’s New

Guess what? The latest flavor of Ubuntu has just dropped! It’s called “Plucky Puffin” (how cute is that?), and it’s officially out and about, all powered up by the shiny new Linux kernel 6.14.

This release has a special meaning, as it’s dedicated to Steve Langasek, a longtime legend on the Ubuntu release team and a really respected guy in the Debian world. Sadly, he passed away earlier this year, on January 1st, 2025. So, this one’s for Steve.

What’s Cooking Under the Hood?

Right at the heart of “Plucky Puffin” is systemd 257.4. This brings a bunch of cool updates from the systemd folks and also says goodbye to some older bits and pieces.

One notable change is that Ubuntu has waved goodbye to utmp support, and those old-school System V init scripts are also on their way out. It’s all about keeping things modern!

Netplan 1.1.2 is also on board, and it now lets you connect to WPA-PSK-SHA256 Wi-Fi networks and set up routing policies through the NetworkManager backend. 

Plus, the systemd-networkd-wait-online service is now a bit smarter – it’ll actually wait until your DNS is reachable before saying your network is “up.”

Goodies for Developers: Toolchain Updates

Calling all coders! Ubuntu 25.04 is packed with fresh tools:

• GCC 14.2 (and a little peek at version 15!)
• glibc 2.41, binutils 2.44
• Python 3.13.3
• LLVM 20, Rust 1.84, and Go 1.24

What does all this mean for you? Faster software building, more cool language features to play with, and overall better performance for your projects.

Smoother Desktop, Nicer Graphics

The everyday desktop experience has also gotten a nice polish.

Ubuntu is now rocking GNOME 48, which introduces something called “triple buffering” in Wayland. The result? Super smooth animations on your screen. Plus, if you’re someone who likes to run both Windows and Ubuntu, the new installer makes it easier to dual-boot even if your Windows drive is encrypted with BitLocker. That’s a win-win!

And your favorite apps? They’ve gotten some love too:

• Firefox 137
• LibreOffice 25.2
• Thunderbird 128
• GIMP 3.0

The Fish shell is also making its debut in version 4 – it’s been rewritten in Rust, which should make it even faster.

Under-the-Hood Upgrades

Lots of important bits of the system have also been updated:

• BlueZ 5.79 (better Bluetooth pairing and support for low-energy Bluetooth devices)
• Cairo 1.18 (faster for drawing 2D stuff on your screen)
• NetworkManager 1.52 (smarter when you’re moving between Wi-Fi networks)
• PipeWire 1.2.7 (better at handling audio and video smoothly, plus more support for different types of audio/video files)
• Poppler 25.03, xdg-desktop-portal 1.20, NVIDIA 570 drivers

Also, something cool: libva, which helps with video acceleration, has moved to the main part of Ubuntu. This means if you want to use your hardware to speed up video playback (using VA-API), you can just run sudo apt install va-driver-all and you’re good to go!

Say Hello to Papers, and More Rust!

The default app for viewing PDFs is now called Papers, replacing Evince. It’s built using the newer GTK 4 and has some parts rewritten in Rust, which should make it feel modern and perform faster.

This is part of a bigger trend in Ubuntu to move away from older software, and that includes updates to how it handles security, with OpenSSL 3.4.1 and GnuTLS 3.8.9.

Good News for Gamers and Hardware Fans

If you’ve got a supported laptop with an NVIDIA card, NVIDIA Dynamic Boost is now enabled by default. This means your laptop will intelligently shift power between the CPU and GPU to give you the best performance while gaming.

Intel users aren’t left out either! There’s now full support for the latest Core Ultra Xe2 CPUs and Arc B580/B570 GPUs. This unlocks things like faster video encoding (for AVC, JPEG, HEVC, AV1), better ray tracing in apps like Blender, and improvements for AI and machine learning tasks using oneAPI Level Zero.

Containers, Databases, and Web Dev Goodies

If you’re into containers:

• Docker 27.5 and containerd 2.0 are included right out of the box.

For databases:

• MySQL 8.4 LTS is here, and it’s the first long-term support version of MySQL!
• PostgreSQL 17 brings better support for JSON data and smarter ways of managing memory.

And for web developers, you’ll be happy to see PHP 8.4, which comes with a bunch of new features and performance improvements.

Smarter Package Management with APT 3.0

The tool Ubuntu uses to install and manage software, APT, has hit version 3.0, and it’s got some cool new features:

• It now has a built-in way to view the output of commands like apt show and apt list, so you don’t need to pipe it through another program.
• It’s got a smarter way of figuring out which software bits depend on each other, which should make installing and updating smoother.
• It now uses OpenSSL instead of GnuTLS for secure connections (TLS).
• The old apt-key command is officially gone – it’s time to update your scripts to use gpgv for managing software keys.

Ready to Take It for a Spin?

You can grab the Ubuntu 25.04 ISO images right now – and that includes all the different official versions like:

Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Unity, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, and Xubuntu.

👉 Download Ubuntu 25.04

👉 Read the full release notes

Just a heads-up: “Plucky Puffin” is what’s called a “short-term release,” which means it’ll get updates for about 9 months (until January 2026).

If you need something that’s supported for a long time and super stable, you might want to stick with Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS, which will be supported all the way through 2029.

But if you’re excited to try out the latest and greatest tech, this little Puffin is ready to fly!