Ubuntu developers today announced that Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ is officially open for development.
There’s even a release date: Ubuntu 25.04 is out on April 17, 2025.
Still, that’s a way off; there are 6 months of development stretching out ahead of us.
But looking in to the distance one can’t help but wonder what new features Ubuntu 25.04 will offer.
It’s too early in the release cycle to know, although GNOME 48, a newer Linux kernel (likely 6.14), and Snap app improvements are all-but a given.
Still, would it be too much to hope that the Plucky cycle finally delivers that long-promised yet perpetually-unready Ubuntu Core Desktop preview?
Remains to be seen!
Still, there is a major toolchain change are already in play — as boring as that stuff can be, this time it isn’t.
Ubuntu 25.04 Makes Big Compiler Change
Ubuntu’s Paride Legovini confirms that “dpkg-buildflags defaults to -O3 instead of -O2. This might require changes in package builds. Please be aware that we already build with -O3 on ppc64el, so look for possible packaging adjustments.”
Ubuntu 25.04 will builds packages with more aggressive compiler optimisation level (-O3 instead of -O2). Canonical says this uses “sophisticated algorithms aimed at enhancing execution speed” – which sounds promising.
Testing -O3 builds of Ubuntu 24.10 showed appreciable performance improvements across the board while using the advanced optimisations. Not enough to make a slow computer hugely faster, but a little more pep to help apps and workloads run more efficiently.
Downsides are larger binary sizes, slower compilation time (which doesn’t affect end-users so much), and uncertainty as to whether all packages will benefit from the optimisations.
But for now, it stands to be a bill-iant change for the Plucky Puffin – the first of many to come, I’m sure.