If you’re wondering why you can’t do a directly upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 from 24.04 yet, despite the Resolute Raccoon’s first point release being live, there is a reason.
Canonical’s Oliver Reiche said in the mailing list announcement for Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS that upgrades will be delayed by a few weeks to allow couple of backports to land. These will “address regressions in a recent version of rust-coreutils”.
Users on Ubuntu 25.10 are not affected by this; upgrades from 25.10 went live in April.
Unlike the ISOs, which target a fixed release date, upgrades don’t. When the ISO drops that doesn’t mean upgrades go live – that confuse some users. Confusion goes double for LTS-to-LTS upgrades, since they are only officially enabled after the first point release.
That added wait is because, with two years of package changes to handle in one go, no two systems alike and the fact LTS releases are about stability, more testing is done and edge case bugs found.
A fresh install can skip all of that.
Direct upgrades have to migrate thousands of interlinked packages, dependency chains and so on, en masse. Fixes may need to land in the base LTS or the one being upgraded to. That can take time – the aforementioned rust-coreutils regression being a good example!
Keep calm and stop refreshing
So there you have it; you can ease off opening Software Updater on the hour, and relax the finger aerobics from sudo do-release-upgrade -c. You’ll be able to upgrade in early September, so be patient.
If you don’t want to wait, you can upgrade to 26.04 from 24.04 using the command-line, but as the upgrade route is not officially blessed yet, you need to pass the development flag and be aware of possible risks:
sudo do-release-upgrade -d
Check out my What’s new since Ubuntu 24.04? roundup to swot up on the swathe of changes coming, including a nicer looking APT, the (aforementioned) Rust-based coreutils, 7 new default apps, optional Wellbeing controls, notification grouping and much more.
Not that you have to upgrade: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is supported until 2029 with regular updates, and until 2034 with extended security coverage when you enable Ubuntu Pro.