A big shakeup to Ubuntu’s release process has been announced by Canonical, with the introduction of new monthly snapshot releases — beginning this month!
Before I dive in to the details I’ll state upfront: this is not a move to monthly stable releases, nor the adoption of a rolling release model. Canonical says it is “committed” to its regular 6-monthly releases with a Long Term Support (LTS) release every 2 years.
However, software engineering has evolved, and the way Ubuntu releases are tested, built, and debugged could be improved by taking advantage of the opportunities that newer technologies, approaches and idea — ego, a release process revamp is in order.
Ubuntu’s once-anarchic release cadence looks rather conservative in 2025
Rewind 20 years and Ubuntu’s goal of putting out a major new distro release every 6 months—barring the odd slip, eh Dapper Drake—was seen as an unorthodox and over-ambitious commitment.
Back then, OS releases tended to happen when they happened.
Fast forward to today, with rolling-release distributions aplenty, and increasing interest in the way iterative image-based immutable Linux distributions are built, and Ubuntu’s once-anarchic release cadence looks rather conservative.
It’s also not infallible, either. As we’ve seen in recent years, the emphasis on extensive testing nearer key release dates means that when major failures are picked up, they become “blockers” to a release going out.
Hindsight analysis helps identify how things got missed during testing, but when there’s only one formal release every 6 months… Fewer opportunities to battle-harden the process.
Which is why change is afoot.
What are Ubuntu Monthly Snapshots?
Starting this month (May 2025), Ubuntu begins a new release process that, it says, “takes advantage of modern release engineering practices, while retaining the resilience and stability of our six-monthly releases.”
We’ll introduce significantly more automated testing, and ensure that the release process is transparent, repeatable and executable in a much shorter and well-known timeframe with little to no human intervention.
Jon Seager, Canonical
A key plank in the revised approach are new monthly snapshot releases. But what exactly are they, and who are they aimed at?
Ubuntu monthly snapshots are development snapshots of the upcoming release, described as “curated, testable milestones”.
Snapshots are not new stable releases, and won’t carry their own version number (so don’t expect Ubuntu 25.06, 25.07, etc – but Ubuntu 25.10 Snapshot 1, Snapshot 2, etc).
At this point, you might be thinking to yourself “so snapshots are just monthly alpha releases?” — and yeah, to an extent, they are.
But the snapshots are tied to Ubuntu’s plans to “supercharge” its release processes with extensive automated testing—not simply testing near key release dates where big issues have bigger knock-on effects—and repeatable, reproducible build pipelines.
Ergo: a new label is fitting.
When can I download an Ubuntu Snapshot?
Periodic snapshots of Ubuntu 25.10 ‘Questing Quokka’ will be issued over the coming months, giving developers, testers and general enthusiasts to change to download and try them — and feedback if anything glaring was missed.
Ubuntu 25.10’s snapshot schedule runs thus:
- May 29: Snapshot 1
- June 10: Snapshot 2
- July 15: Snapshot 3
- August 19: Snapshot 4
Then:
- September 18: Beta
- October 9: Final Ubuntu 25.10 release
With more extensive automated testing of ISO, installer and critical OS features happening throughout the development cycle, the new monthly snapshots should allow major issues to be found sooner (with reduced pressure from release dates).
Powering the initiative is an open-source workflow tool called Temporal, with Canonical aiming to rewrite Ubuntu’s existing release checklist as Go functions (with accompanying tests), patching that into Temporal workflow, and letting it handle the rest.
Making it easier for the community to not only see which tests are run, any issues therein, but also write and contribute their own test will provides greater opportunities to improve the overall reliability of the end release.
Of course, none of this is going to happen overnight. This will be an iterative process. Canonical’s engineers will learn and adapt and change parts of the existing processes step-by-step. It’s also hiring to improve it further.
Wondering what happens to all the “humans” in this?
A lot of current Ubuntu testing is done by volunteers, with many of the biggest ‘blockers’ affecting recent releases being found by humans in builds that had passed automatic testing.
Canonical says it wants to “ensure that our volunteers’ time is spent as productively and rewardingly as possible, and I think we can automate much of this testing and allow them to focus on the more complex and nuanced aspects of each release”.
If the end result is a more stable, reliable Ubuntu experience, allowing community developers to focus their talents and enthusiasm on less tedious areas of the OS, the net-results will benefit everyone – especially end users.