A sure-fire way to tell that development is shifting gear: the first Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds are now available to download.
Formal development on Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ began in October, and while it’s a long way to the final stable release of Ubuntu 25.04 on Thursday April 17, 2025, there’s no time for a breather.
You may be wondering what sort of new features Ubuntu 25.04 will offer. You, and everyone else, can find out first-hand, for yourself by taking a daily build for a spin.
Only, there’s not much new to see at the time I write this, of course.
What’s Coming in Ubuntu 25.04?
We know Ubuntu plans to ship a new document viewer app in Ubuntu 25.04 – not yet included, and use Linux 6.14 kernel – yes, 6.14. But since Linux kernel 6.12 was only just released, and work on 6.13 underway, that’ll require a wait.
GNOME 48 is in the midst of development, but the daily builds still carry GNOME 47. Per tradition, Ubuntu development builds only switch to the next series around the first GNOME beta appears – so don’t expect to see anything on that front.
Additionally, further features are in the mix for the desktop Security Center app as more snaps take advantage, and devs plan to add a ‘reinstall’ option and improve dual-boot configurations in Ubuntu’s Flutter-based OS installer.
But, again, none of that is present at the time I write this.
Yet beneath the surface there is a whopping great change as Ubuntu 25.04 now builds all packages with an aggressive compiler optimisation level “aimed at enhancing execution speed” – and benchmarks done so far, bear that out.
Perhaps Ubuntu 25.04 should’ve been named ‘Peppy Puffin’!
Who are Ubuntu Daily Builds for?
Ubuntu daily builds are pre-release installers generated from scratch each and every day – a ‘snapshot’ of progress. They’re designed to be used by developers, bug hunters, and app makers so they can try, test, and adapt to the latest changes in good time.
However, Ubuntu daily builds are not intended to be used on production systems (i.e., as your only OS) because they’re unstable, unfinished, and liable to receive package updates which (temporarily) ‘break’ core functionality.
Go in knowing the risks, and don’t be annoyed if your install gets borked and you need to reinstall – rare, but the potential for it to happen is there.
You can download a ‘current’ daily build — ‘current’ ISOs have passed a series of automated tests, while ‘pending’ ISOs have yet to be checked — and install updates as they’re released, effectively using it like a rolling release Linux distribution.
Download Ubuntu 25.04 Daily Build
You can download Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds from the Ubuntu cdimage website. They come as a standard ISO for 64-bit Intel/AMD or a generic 64-bit ARM1 image.
Always use the latest ISO from the ‘current’ folder unless you specifically need to test/use something that is currently in the ‘pending’ ISO and you can’t wait.
Flash the ISO to a USB to create bootable media you can then use to boot the release on laptop or PC and play around (you can, of course, choose to install it too – but bugs put any data on that device at risk).
Alternatively, and recommended, boot the ISO in the safety of a virtual machine and install it there.
- Raspberry Pi daily build are up a level in the ‘daily-preinstalled’ folder ↩︎