Daily builds for Ubuntu 24.04 are now available for download.
Development on Ubuntu 24.04 ‘Noble Numbat’, which will become the next long-term support (LTS) release upon its official release in April 2024, kicked off last week.
As you might expect this early in the development cycle, there’s not a lot of “new” things to see, hear, or talk about at the time of writing this post (Nov 1). This will change in the coming weeks and months.
What are Ubuntu Daily Builds?
Ubuntu daily builds are pre-release versions of Ubuntu generated every day as a ‘snapshot’ of progress. They are intended for developers and testers who want to try out the latest features and changes in Ubuntu before they are released to the public.
This allows them to hunt for bugs, identify regressions, and generally kick-the-tyres on what’s coming down the pipes.
However, it is important to be note that Ubuntu daily builds are not meant to be used as your main OS because they will contain bugs, alpha/beta-quality software, half-finished features, and sometimes receive package updates that ‘break’ core functionality – like the ability to login!
Despite the risks, daily builds are a great way to ‘ride’ the Ubuntu development cycle. You can install a ‘current’ daily build — ‘current’ builds have passed a series of automated tests — and install updates as they’re released, effectively treating it like a rolling release distro.
Many folks, myself included, do that.
Download Ubuntu 24.04 Daily Builds
You can download Ubuntu 24.04 daily builds from the Ubuntu cdimage website as a standard ISO. You can use this image to create bootable media to install the release on real hardware or (advised) in the safety of a virtual machine.
Daily builds in the ‘current’ folder have passed a series of automated tests, while those in the ‘pending’ folder have not. Use the images in the current folder where possible, unless you the image you need is only available in pending.