Ghostty terminal fans needn’t fear an upgrade to Ubuntu’s latest release, as a community packaging effort just added Ghostty DEB packages for Ubuntu 25.04.

The Ghostty Ubuntu project was set up was the aim of providing “Ubuntu/Debian (.deb) packages for Ghostty” so users on supported Linux distributions, including Ubuntu-based distros like Linux Mint and ZorinOS, can download, install and use the app properly.

To date, there’s no official snap1 or Flatpak version of Ghostty available, and although compiling it from source isn’t hard, it’s more hassle than most are willing to go through to try a new app — yes, even one as hyped as Ghostty!

Which is why this DEB packing project, led by software engineer Mike Kasberg, is welcome.

Ghostty Terminal Recap

It’s a terminal that does things terminals do

Not heard of Ghostty?

It’s a new(ish) open-source terminal emulator for macOS, Linux and (soon) Windows, created by Mitchell Hashimoto using Zig with the aim of providing a “fast, feature-rich, and native” experience on each platform it runs on.

Ghostty is cross-platform without compromise – unlike many of its ilk!

Ghostty doesn’t claim to be faster, more featured or integrate deeper than {insert any rival here}. Rather, its USP is in the fact it focuses at being great at all three.

All the usual end-user features one would expect are present (tabs, splits, ligatures, GPU rendering, themes etc), and features makers of terminal apps can use (kitty graphics, synchronised rendering, etc) to create better end-user experiences.

While many cross-platform terminals tend to make compromises, often for pragmatic or programatic reasons, Ghostty chooses not to. It wants to “look, feel, and behave like a purpose-built native application on each platform”.

That is my way of answering that “cool, but what does Ghostty do that other terminal apps don’t?” question as the answer is “not much”; it does everything other VTEs do, just in a different way with a different focus — like most software that exists!

But for those moving between different OSes, be it out of need, wont or habit, working with cross-platform tools is preferable since using a tool(s) one is already familiar with requires less cognitive adaptation — aka less hassle.

And to dovetail back to my point earlier, no-one likes hassle if it can be avoided – which is why the community Ghostty DEB packages for Ubuntu (and Debian) are popular.

Download Ghostty DEB for Ubuntu

If you use Ubuntu and you want to try Ghostty out for yourself2, you don’t need—so sorry for this—to go a Ghostty hunt to do so.

The unofficial Ghostty Ubuntu project produce Ghostty DEB installers for supported Ubuntu releases (Intel/AMD & ARM) plus Debian Bookworm.

As these are standalone DEBs they won’t auto-update to newer versions. When a new version of Ghostty is released, new DEBs are packaged and made available to download. Updates can be installed over the top (your settings, etc stay intact).

Download them from the GitHub releases page linked below and install as you would any other DEB3.

• Download Ghostty Ubuntu DEB packages on GitHub

  1. There is an unofficial snap package but …snaps are as popular as the UK at Eurovision. ↩︎
  2. Don’t want a DEB? Use the unofficial Ghostty AppImage, if you prefer. ↩︎
  3. For me that’s via the terminal: sudo apt install /path/to.deb as apt install means you can easily apt remove it at a later date – not that you’d dare, right? ↩︎