Yes, Puffins can fly. I saw one doing just that in Wales the other week. And, Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical‘s latest Ubuntu Linux distro, is also flying.
Canonical has officially released Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed “Plucky Puffin,” marking another significant milestone for the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution. The release, now available for download, brings a host of new features, performance enhancements and under-the-hood improvements designed for both everyday users and developers.
The follow-up to Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole is the 20th anniversary edition of Ubuntu. Shipping with the GNOME 48 desktop interface, the biggest improvement here is that Mutter, the GNOME display manager, now supports dynamic triple buffering. This provides noticeably smoother animations and fewer skipped frames, especially during intense graphical activity or on High-Density Pixel displays (HiDPI).
This latest version of GNOME also features a “Wellbeing Panel” to help you manage your screen time, and a “Preserve Battery Health” mode to extend the lifespan of your laptop battery.
Finally, the Nautilus file manager is significantly faster, especially when handling large folders with many thumbnails. I’m glad to see this improvement, as the previous slowdown in dealing with my huge directories has been annoying me for some time.
Under the hood, Puffin is running Linux kernel 6.14. The latest kernel brings improved hardware support, enhanced energy efficiency and security patches. Notably, it boasts enhanced gaming support via the NTSYNC driver for Wine/Proton, as well as improved container tooling with decoupled bpftools and linux-perf.
The Ubuntu installer now offers a more seamless experience, particularly for users installing Ubuntu alongside other operating systems. It features improved handling of Windows BitLocker-encrypted disks and advanced partitioning options, making dual-boot setups more reliable.
As before, Ubuntu doesn’t ship with numerous applications. If you don’t like the default programs — Firefox for a web browser, LibreOffice for office applications and Thunderbird for email — you can easily install your preferred applications from the App Center.
However, there are new default apps. The Papers PDF reader replaces Evince with a modern design and better performance. The geolocation service now uses BeaconDB, enabling features such as automatic timezone detection and night light adjustments.
For those who look more deeply, networking and identity management have also been improved with such upgrades as secure time sync with Network Time Security (NTS), better Active Directory (AD) integration, cloud authentication against EntraID (formerly Azure AD), Google identity and Netplan Domain Name System (DNS)-aware wait-online logic.
Ubuntu 25.04 also introduces “devpacks.” These are snap bundles for popular frameworks such as Go and Spring, alongside updated toolchains for Python, Rust, .NET, LLVM and OpenJDK. These improvements streamline development workflows and expand the availability of the toolchain.
Alongside Ubuntu 25.04, official flavors such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and others have also been updated, each bringing their own improvements. Maintenance updates for all 25.04 releases will be provided for nine months. If you want more support, you need to get a long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu. The most up-to-date LTS version is Ubuntu 24.04, which will be supported until April 2034.
If you want to try it out, just grab a computer, pretty much any one made in the 21st century. So long as it has a 2GHz dual-core processor, 4GBs of RAM, and 25GBs of free disk space, you’ll be in business.
Personally, I’m flying the Puffin from my 2020 vintage Dell Precision 3451. This once high-end laptop originally came with Ubuntu 20.04. It is powered by an Intel 8-core 3GHz i7-9700 CPU and also includes 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.
That’s far more computer horsepower than Ubuntu needs. If your PC came with Windows 7, the Puffin can fly from it..
Installing Ubuntu 22.04 like any modern Linux distribution, is a breeze. The short version? Download Plucky Puffin, burn it to a USB stick, boot, and run it to check if it works with your hardware. If all goes well, press the Install button. That’s all there is to it.
