As we (or maybe just I) stumble bleary-eyed into 2026, I want to take a moment to look back at the notable features, changes and innovations Ubuntu saw in 2025.
It was, as ever, quite a year.
We got two major stable releases (Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ and Ubuntu 25.10 ‘Questing Quokka’); point releases and HWE updates for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS; and Canonical pushed forward with an ambitious (and very on-trend) “oxidisation” strategy.
The distro adopted new desktop apps, bumped technical baselines, and pursued new approaches to its own development and testing procedures.
Below is a round up of 10 things Ubuntu got, did, or committed to in 2025 (listed in no particular order).
Ubuntu in 2025: 10 Key Things
1. Ubuntu Goes Rust-y
2025 was the year Ubuntu began to ‘oxidise’ itself.
Ubuntu 25.10 shipped with sudo-rs, a Rust reimplementation of the long-standing sudo command, as well as Rust-based replacements for core command-line utilities like ls, cp, and mv.
Rust-ification is something of a trend, but Canonical’s motivations aren’t about being cool, but more about security: Rust’s memory-related security benefits forgo cat-and-mouse vulnerabilities that have addle C-based tools for decades.
Was the transition smooth? No. Bugs and edge-case issues were introduced, such as auto-updates breaking silently.
But the switch is evidence of Ubuntu’s ongoing commitment to evaluating and adopting newer technologies in the distro where it makes sense, based on merit.
2. GNOME 48 & 49 Double Feature
Ubuntu users got to enjoy two new GNOME releases in 2025, each offering the usual collection of new features, interface tweaks, performance buffs, and so on.
GNOME 48 in Ubuntu 25.04 introduced new screen-time management; options to extend laptop battery lifespan; notification grouping; and HDR support. Canonical’s triple buffering patches finally landed upstream to benefit all users of GNOME, not just those on Ubuntu.
GNOME 49 in Ubuntu 25.10 brought media and power controls to the lock screen; improved accessibility features throughout; a revamped search experience in Nautilus file manager; new UI animations; and a ‘mega’ Mutter update with smarter, sharper fractional scaling.
Though Ubuntu doesn’t make GNOME, it does contributes and engaging with upstream during development of new versions. As the desktop the distro chooses to use by default, these are all changes those of you using Ubuntu benefited from in 2025.
3. X11 Got the Boot (Sort Of)
In a move that surprised pretty much nobody who’s been paying attention to the direction of travel, this was the year Ubuntu 25.10 removed the X11 session from its desktop installations. The distro has been using Wayland as its default display server since 2021.
Not that this was strictly Ubuntu’s decision. GNOME developers made the decision to disable the ability to run the desktop on X11/Xorg in GNOME 49, and remove the code entirely in GNOME 50. With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS an LTS, making this change early was required.
A few folks remain confused by this change and what it means (though most users didn’t notice or don’t care) so to be clear:
- Most software that relies on X11/Xorg will work on Wayland via Xwayland
- X11/Xorg packages are available in the Ubuntu repositories
Those who can’t or don’t want to use Wayland don’t need to abandon Ubuntu as many flavours continue to ship and default to X11/Xorg, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS supports it fully – with LTS support extended to 15 years, there’s no need to fret.
4. Monthly Development Snapshots
2025 saw the Ubuntu engineering team add new Monthly Snapshots to its release process. But before anyone (who’d not heard of these prior) gets excited, this wasn’t Ubuntu adopting a rolling release model with periodical stable hop-on points.
Ubuntu monthly snapshots are issued alongside daily builds, betas and release candidates, rather than replacements for them. What’s different about them is how they’re built.
Snapshots are created using an open-source workflow tool called Temporal. This allows Ubuntu’s existing release checklist to be rewritten as Go functions with tests that can be easily added, amended, transparently vetted, etc.
With a more hands-off, automated process that is better documented and requires less handholding or human input, this boring infrastructure change (sorry) could make releases more reliable, freeing up engineers and testers to work on other things.
Whether that actually works in the long term remains to be seen, but it’s a noble goal.
5. Installer Stuff
The Ubuntu OS installer saw further refinement in 2025, adding support for experimental TPM-backed Full Disk Encryption. The feature, as its name implies, uses the Trusted Platform Module chip on modern devices to store encryption keys securely.
While this hasn’t worked well for everyone who’s tried it, and not all TPM modules are supported leading to some frustration, the feature is marked experimental and there should be continued effort to make it a solid, stable option in future releases.
Other installer (and installer adjacent) changes saw better signposting and warnings when setting up an encryption install using LUKS, including prominent recovery key creation (plus Desktop Security Center access to edit/generate a new one).
The installer also now gives more details about existing operating systems, meaning multi-boot setups are less of a minefield and replacing an existing Ubuntu install with a newer one is easier. Plus, better handling of installation on Windows BitLocker-encrypted disks.
In all, solid updates for this transient yet oh-so critical part of the distro experience.
6. RISC-V RVA23 Baseline Shift
In 2025, Canonical made a controversial move with Ubuntu’s support for RISC-V: it raised the distro’s baseline requirements to RVA23, leaving almost all consumer RISC-V hardware on sale incompatible with it.
Canonical made new versions of Ubuntu incompatible with nearly all RISC-V hardware on sale
It sounds counterintuitive to reduce the range of hardware the distro can run on, but the motivation sound.
RVA23 ISA puts RISC-V performance and capabilities on better footing with other CPU architectures, like ARMv9.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS continues to support existing RISC-V hardware, and that release will receive critical updates for years to come, so those with older SBCs aren’t adrift (plus, other distros exist).
If you plan to buy RISC-V hardware tinker and test around with in 2026, make sure what you buy either supports the newer instruction sets Ubuntu requires, or check that you’re content to keep chugging away with the previous LTS.
7. Raspberry Pi A/B Booting
If you run Ubuntu 25.10 on a Raspberry Pi, you benefitted from a new A/B booting process in 2025.
A/B booting does what it suggests: it maintains two bootable system images and, if an update goes sideways, will fall back to the last known ‘good’ image (rather than failing to boot, annoying on Pi’s running as servers with auto-updates enabled).
Other Pi-related changes brought a smaller installation footprint with fewer preinstalled apps (since few novices use Pis as their primary desktop PCs, they’re likely aware of what software they need/want), and support for the latest models, like the Raspberry Pi 500+.
8. Securing Time
A change in how Ubuntu synchronises network time is not headline-grabbing stuff (which is my post on the change was one of the least read articles I wrote last year). Yet time detection is a rather important security vector – one Canonical decided to lock down in 2025
Ubuntu 25.04 introduced Network Time Security (NTS) support, but Ubuntu 25.10 enabled it by default with NTS encrypting time traffic using Chrony.
This stops would-be attackers from manipulating system clocks, thwarting any budget Doctor Who villains looking to cause temporal chaos for security certificates.
I’d wager few noticed this change, but as a fundamental security “buff” that benefits everyone, it’s the sort of invisible improvement that ought to draw more attention.
9. Default App Refresh Wave
Ubuntu made a number of app swaps in 2025 (set to continue in 2026 with the addition of Resources and Showtime) that refreshed the default software experience.
Ubuntu 25.04 switched to Papers as the default PDF viewer, replacing the aged Evince. Though forked from the same codebase, Papers opts to use new technologies, has a cleaner UI, some newer features and, recently, GPU acceleration too.
Ubuntu 25.10 delivered Loupe as the default image viewer, replacing Eye of GNOME, and saw Ptyxis replace GNOME Terminal. Both apps do the same tasks, but look and work better due to their use of GTK4/libadwaita and newer libraries.
Importantly, the old apps remain available in the Ubuntu repos. Those who prefer the originals, can continue to install and use them (and those who upgrade with the old ones installed do not have them forcibly replaced, per Ubuntu’s tradition).
As someone who’s been covering the distro long enough to have whiplash from previous default app changes, these feel like a sensible swaps rather than change for change’s sake.
10. Dracut
This year Ubuntu adopted Dracut as its default initial RAM filesystem (initramfs) generator, replacing the decades-old initramfs-tools. Another invisible change few would notice which, as I remarked in my pithy explainer on what it all means, is precisely the point of a good boot system.
The tl;dr is that Dracut uses a modular, modern and pragmatic approach when detecting hardware during boot, rather than relying on hardcoded scripts that attempts to anticipate every possible configuration.
More importantly, Dracut supports newer technologies (like network encryption) and modern expectations (like responding to Bluetooth keyboard input during boot).
The result is less guesswork behind the scenes which results in faster boot times – but we’re talking milliseconds, not minutes.
10.5. Trash Rehashed
A cheeky half highlight since the community designers who work on the Yaru icon, Shell and GTK themes did a lot of good stuff in 2025, and they deserve a shout out.
They tackled errant radii, incongruent icons, capricious spacing, added some new icons, and redesigned a couple of existing ones, including my own pet-peeve: the ‘rubbish bin’.
Yes, 2025 was the year Ubuntu finally junked its weird post-box style trash icon, replacing it with a visual metaphor that literally looks like rubbish.
What was your highlight?
Those were there 10 things Ubuntu changed or adopted in 2025 that stood out to me, but they’re far from the only improvements, bug fixes and refinements which landed throughout the year.
All eyes are now on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, out in April, but 2025 saw much of the groundwork laid down to make the next Long-Term Support release a long-term success.
Help keep the positivity going by sharing your Ubuntu highlight(s) down in the comments. I’m interested to learn what your key highlight was from last year.