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If you’ve been checking…

Ubuntu 25.10 was released on October 9, but if you use Ubuntu 25.04 you may be wondering why you can’t upgrade yet.

The reason is that upgrades have not yet been enabled.

According to Canonical’s Matthieu Clemenceau, the plan is to enable upgrades from 25.04 to 25.10 “on or before October 23rd”.

If past precedence hold, I’d expect the upgrade ‘gate’ to open before, but arguably the more time taken to ensure the upgrade process happens without issue, the better.

“But Joey,” some may be primed to say, “it is already possible to upgrade to Ubuntu 25.10 from the command-line by running sudo do-release-upgrade -d.”

However, that method is opt-in and unsupported: if the upgrade fails or breaks things, you get to fix things yourself.

It’s October 26 and upgrades have yet to be enabled. This is likely due to recently discovered critical bugs in the rust-coreutils package.

Why is there a delay for upgrades?

Technically there isn’t a “delay”. Though a new ISO is made available to download on release day, direct upgrades1 have always been enabled in the days after. It’s not unusual to not see “a new version of Ubuntu is available” prompt right away.

Sometimes, that prompt appears ~12 hours of the ISO download going live. Sometimes, it takes a few weeks to appear. The length varies based on the makeup of the release, any bugs or regressions reported, and whether fixes need to pushed out to ensure upgrades don’t fail.

In the past, the upgrade “gate” was staggered. A percentage of users would see the upgrade prompt first and, if they reported no major issues following their upgrade, it rolled out to more, and so on until it reached 100%.

Perhaps what is is (a bit) unusual is to hear Canonical say upfront that upgrades won’t be live for a few weeks. But given what happened in the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle (see below) and the amount of changes Ubuntu 25.10 packs in, which the upgrade tool has to accommodate, it’s understandable.

Fresh installs and direct upgrades both undergo lots of testing. Clean installs are easier to spot failure in, and in-place upgrades trickier since the majority of people don’t upgrade from a vanilla system, with all settings, packages, and config values as they were originally.

Ubuntu does its best to handle as many potential supported configurations as it can, but there are always edges cases (especially for those who enabled ‘experimental’ features, like TPM-backed disk encryption or installing Ubuntu on ZFS).

Ubuntu has seen some tumultuous in-place upgrades in recent years. Upgrades from 24.10 to 25.04 were enabled too early, which led to reams of users being left with broken systems. A lengthy delay followed until upgrades could be re-enable.

The majority of upgrade issues are caused by package conflicts. Once a cause is found, devs have to fix or patch it, then package and push out an update to the relevant release. Those processes can take time.

Meanwhile, the latest Ubuntu 25.10 release broke Flatpak apps (past tense as it’s now fixed). Had upgrades been enabled right away, that would’ve impacted the workflows of many users.

A ‘delay’ in upgrading is irritating for the impatient — given Ubuntu 25.10’s impressive features, impatience is understandable — but a bit of breathing room will help improve the overall reliability of the upgrade process.

Besides which, the “by” date is just that; upgrades could be enabled sooner. Keep an eye out for an upgrade prompt on your desktop, or on this blog as my “how to upgrade” guide will go live the moment upgrades do!

  1. For the avoidance of doubt: when I talk about upgrading to Ubuntu in this post I mean officially, as in not using the -d flag). ↩︎