Also available on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@javierorozco.observer:6/Ubuntu26.04:1

On the channel I already covered the ethical, purist approach to free software with the Trisquel 12 release. Now it is time for the industry heavyweight.

On April 23, 2026, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed “Resolute Raccoon”, was released. I know that every two years a new LTS comes out and every two years someone says “this is the most important one in history”, but this time I am going to argue why that claim carries more weight than ever.

This edition brings changes that had been years in the making: the definitive move to Wayland, core tools rewritten in Rust for memory safety, CUDA and ROCm directly in the official repositories with no external repositories, and a 7.0 kernel that natively integrates artificial intelligence ecosystems.

This is not a maintenance update. It is a change of era. If you manage servers, deploy infrastructure, game on Linux, or simply want to squeeze the most out of your hardware without depending on Windows, here I break down what this release really brings and what each change means.

Installation and TPM encryption

Installing the system is quite intuitive and easy to understand. At the start, the usual: choose a language, keyboard layout, internet connection, installation type, extended selection for more default applications, proprietary drivers and codecs which are disabled by default, partitioning, and the most important part, encryption, which as I said in the previous article is something everyone should always enable, and under no circumstances or pretext should you use a disk or operating system without encryption. In this edition they have added hardware-backed protection with the TPM chip, and to try it out I used it this way in my installation.

Basic details such as username, machine name, password, and the option to require the password at login, which I also always recommend enabling, especially with TPM, since the device boots automatically. Then we have timezone selection and a summary to confirm the installation; once completed, we simply reboot.

The desktop: GNOME 50 and the definitive farewell to X.org

On boot we find a welcome wizard. The first thing it asks is whether we want to enable location services and telemetry to report errors or usage statistics. Both are anonymous, and Canonical has proven over the years to be a very ethical company, so this is left as each person’s individual choice. Then we have the choice between light and dark themes and highlight colors.

As always, the first thing I recommend is installing the updates; there are not many, since this edition came out just a few hours ago:

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sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install fastfetch

Let us start with what most people notice first: the desktop. Ubuntu 26.04 ships with GNOME 50 and marks a historic milestone: it is the first Ubuntu LTS with no X or X.org session available in GNOME. Wayland is now the absolute king of the GNOME desktop. If you have old applications developed for X11, do not worry: XWayland is still there as a compatibility layer and in most cases you will not notice the difference.

But the benefits of Wayland are already undeniable. If you have a high-refresh-rate monitor, VRR or variable refresh rate, also called G-Sync and FreeSync, can be enabled on supported displays. Per-monitor fractional scaling is now production-worthy. And the desktop flows without tearing, that is, without desynchronization, even under heavy load and at high refresh rates.

The settings center covers the essentials quickly and concisely: the blue light or night light filter, wired networks, Wi-Fi, VPN and proxies, Bluetooth adapters, audio devices for both output and input and system sounds, power profiles, multitasking and screen edges, appearance and desktop customization, application management, permissions and notifications, dash search configuration, online accounts, and local file sharing and media streaming.

The new default applications

GNOME 50 is not just the shell. The default application ecosystem changes quite a bit:

Showtime as the video player. More modern, better system integration, and the option to install missing proprietary codecs if needed.

Resources replaces the old System Monitor. This one is especially interesting: it not only shows CPU and RAM, it also tracks GPU usage, hardware clock frequencies, and NPU (if you have one) and groups processes by application instead of listing them individually. It is written in Rust with GTK4. It is what the system monitor should have been long ago.

Ptyxis is the new default terminal. What sets it apart is native support for managing containers with Podman, Toolbox, and Distrobox. As an example, I installed Fedora inside Ubuntu using Distrobox; yes, just as it sounds. That deserves a separate article, so I will not go deeper into it here, but the process is quite simple, and in the new terminal we always have access to all the containers we have listed: Ubuntu and Fedora living together on the same system. The new terminal also has session restore to recover your tabs and working directory locations when reopening. If you work with containers every day, this is a real quality-of-life change.

Loupe is the new image viewer, also developed in Rust. Papers is the new PDF viewer, based on the same code as the previous one but partially rewritten in Rust with GTK4.

Visual changes

Visually, the dock no longer has transparency; it is completely opaque. Folder icons are now colorful. Notifications are grouped by application, ending the visual mess of having 40 individual notifications.

The App Center now fully manages system .deb packages —install, update, uninstall— in addition to snaps. More cohesion, less need to go to the terminal for basic operations. As an example, I installed a YouTube Music client this way.

You may have noticed that two new search providers were added to the dash: there are App Center results and direct access to web searches in Firefox. Small details, but useful.

NVIDIA and Wayland

If you use NVIDIA, historically the headache of Wayland on GNU/Linux, there are no more excuses: the proprietary 595.x series drivers are the standard in this release, Wayland support is complete, and the freeze issue when waking the machine from suspend is fixed. Versions 535, 550, 560, 570, 575, 580, and 590 are also available.

There is also a new telemetry panel —Ubuntu Insights— to opt in or out of sending anonymous metrics to Canonical. Important: it is completely opt-in. Nobody sends your data without your explicit consent, and the controls are accessible from the welcome wizard.

The notable absence

The “Software & Updates” application —which many used to manage PPAs, repositories, and drivers— no longer comes installed by default. Canonical has not given a fully clear reason for this, and there is debate in the community. But it is still available in the repositories, and its departure from the base system is striking and worth mentioning:

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sudo apt install software-properties-gtk

Security in its DNA: the Rust revolution

Here is where things get serious. As someone who works in cybersecurity, seeing this in a mainstream distribution that is the parent of so many others is music to my ears.

Ubuntu 26.04 is the first LTS to aggressively embrace Rust, the programming language that eliminates at compile time entire classes of vulnerabilities that have plagued C software for decades: buffer overflows, use-after-free, and memory race conditions.

sudo-rs

You will notice it immediately in the terminal: sudo has been replaced by sudo-rs, the reimplementation in Rust. The most visible change is cosmetic but symbolic: you now see asterisks as you type your password. But what matters is underneath: the code that runs privileged operations on your system is no longer written in C.

The original sudo is still available as sudo.ws if you need specific features that sudo-rs does not cover yet.

rust-coreutils (uutils)

Even deeper: the coreutils —the most fundamental tools of the system, ls, cat, base64, head, and dozens more— are now rust-coreutils by default, the implementation of the GNU utils in Rust.

For most users this is transparent. But there is an important technical detail worth clarifying: cp, mv, and rm are still the GNU versions in this release, because there are unresolved bugs in the Rust implementations. If you need to switch back to GNU coreutils for everything, you can, and if you want to go back to Rust, you can too:

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sudo apt install coreutils-from-gnu
sudo apt install coreutils-from-uutils

There are also new kernel components written in Rust. This is not just Ubuntu; it is part of the Linux kernel project’s effort, but Ubuntu 26.04 brings it to LTS-user mainstream for the first time. As a curiosity, rolling-release distributions such as Arch and openSUSE are still on the 6.x branch.

Preventing memory vulnerabilities at the very foundation of the operating system raises the defensive posture of millions of installations. The Rust Foundation celebrated this publicly, noting that Canonical is raising security for millions of users in production.

TPM-backed FDE: serious disk encryption

Hardware TPM-backed full-disk encryption leaves its experimental phase in this release. It is the option we saw in the installer, and it is production-ready.

What does this mean in practice? The encryption keys are tied to your motherboard’s TPM chip. Unlike traditional LUKS where you type a password on every boot, here the disk unlocks automatically when the TPM verifies that the system has not been tampered with, that is, that the hardware is the same, the bootloader was not altered, and there is nothing suspicious. If someone physically removes the disk and connects it to another machine, they cannot access the data. And if you want an extra layer, you can add a PIN.

Against physical-access attacks, this raises the attacker’s cost significantly.

Post-quantum cryptography

One last point that few people notice but that is strategically important: OpenSSL in this release includes support for post-quantum algorithms: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA.

Why does it matter now? Because quantum computers, once powerful enough, will be able to break the RSA and ECC cryptography that protects practically all of today’s digital infrastructure. Preparing the ecosystem for this transition before it becomes urgent —and not after— is exactly what needs to be done. Ubuntu 26.04 starts laying the groundwork.

Kernel 7.0, hardware, and gaming

The engine behind all of this is Linux 7.0. It is the highest version number to reach an Ubuntu LTS in a long time, and it comes loaded.

Intel Panther Lake and NPU support

Kernel 7.0 adds full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake. This includes optimizations for the integrated Xe3 graphics and for the integrated NPU (Neural Processing Unit). If you are on a modern Intel laptop and want to run local AI inference efficiently without depending on a server, this combination of hardware and kernel starts to make real sense.

AMD and NVIDIA

On AMD, Mesa 26 brings ray tracing with the ACO compiler by default and general performance improvements. GPUs from the RX 6000 series onward benefit directly. For those of us running a Radeon card, there are concrete improvements in rendering performance and compute workloads.

On NVIDIA, as I mentioned before: Wayland works fully, suspend is fixed, and the 595 series drivers are the standard. There are no longer technical reasons to avoid Linux on NVIDIA machines, although there are ethical ones —but that is another topic.

Kernel Livepatch for ARM64

Until this release, Canonical’s Kernel Livepatch —which applies critical security patches directly to the running kernel without rebooting— only worked on x86-64. With Ubuntu 26.04, it comes to ARM64 for the first time.

For organizations with ARM servers, this is huge. Before, a critical kernel security patch meant a reboot with a maintenance window and downtime. Not anymore.

EtherCAT for industrial automation

An addition that goes unnoticed by common users but is significant for specific sectors: the IgH EtherCAT Master module and the Generic Ethernet driver are now integrated directly into the kernel. EtherCAT is a real-time industrial networking protocol with microsecond precision, used in robotics, motion control, and factory automation. Having this in the kernel of an official LTS removes a huge integration burden for engineers in that sector.

Gaming: NTSYNC and the end of the Windows pretext

And we reach the point I know several of you were waiting for.

If you are one of those who spend hours cleaning up Windows —disabling telemetry, bloatware, background processes— or installing trimmed-down builds of dubious origin to avoid losing FPS in the middle of a game, this kernel has something for you.

The kernel ships NTSYNC built into Linux 7.0, which emulates Windows NT kernel synchronization primitives directly. This strongly impacts the performance of Windows games and applications running through Wine and Proton. Titles that depend heavily on inter-thread synchronization see real, measurable performance improvements.

Combined with Wayland, Mesa 26, and well-supported NVIDIA and AMD drivers, gaming on GNU/Linux is no longer “an alternative”. It is a direct threat to Windows’ dominance on the gaming desktop. There are still edge cases where Windows is necessary, but the gap is closing with every release, and this one in particular accelerates that process.

CUDA and ROCm in the repositories: Ubuntu’s AI moment

This is the change that will have the most impact over the coming years for AI and machine learning developers.

For the first time in Ubuntu’s history, NVIDIA CUDA is available directly in the official repositories. Before, installing CUDA meant adding NVIDIA’s repository manually, dealing with versions that could break system dependencies, and resolving driver conflicts. Now it is simply:

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sudo apt install cuda

No external repositories. No surprises.

The same applies to AMD ROCm, AMD’s open-source ecosystem for GPU-accelerated workloads —artificial intelligence, machine learning, HPC—. For those of us with AMD hardware, having ROCm available this cleanly completely changes the equation for experimenting with frameworks like PyTorch or JAX on AMD GPUs.

Why does it matter that they are in the official repos and not in external PPAs? Because the packages go through Canonical’s validation and security chain. Updates are tested to work together with the rest of the system. For organizations deploying this in production, the difference between “it works today and breaks with the next apt upgrade” and “it is validated for this LTS” is fundamental.

AMD’s own vice president of Software highlighted that this allows developers to build and deploy on AMD Radeon and Ryzen GPUs with direct access from the repositories, without friction.

Ubuntu 26.04 is making a very clear positioning statement: it wants to be the reference platform for AI development and deployment. With CUDA + ROCm in the repos, native Intel NPU support in the kernel, and confidential computing for private AI, the argument is solid.

System plumbing: APT and systemd

There are “plumbing” changes that go unnoticed but that for the daily work of sysadmins, programmers, or advanced users are as important as anything else.

APT 3.1: transaction history at last

The package manager moves up to version 3.1 and brings the functionality we all dreamed of: interactive transaction history.

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sudo apt history-list
sudo apt history-info 0
sudo apt history-undo 0
sudo apt history-rollback

apt history-list shows what you installed, when, and what changed. apt history-info 0 details a specific transaction. apt history-undo 0 undoes an installation. And apt history-rollback takes you back to an earlier point of the system.

In production, this is a lifesaver. Did you update a package and something broke? Now you have a clean path to roll back. Tools like dnf and pacman have had something like this for a long time; its arrival in APT is welcome.

apt-key, long deprecated, was also removed. Signature verification now uses gpgv directly. If you have automation scripts that use apt-key, review them.

systemd 259: two important changes

First: support for cgroup v1 (legacy and hybrid) is removed. If you have containers or configurations that depend on legacy cgroups, you need to migrate. This must be reviewed before upgrading production systems.

Second: this is the last LTS with System V script compatibility in systemd. From here on, if you have services with SysV-style init scripts, the clock is ticking to migrate them to native systemd units. It is not urgent today, but the signal is clear.

One extra technical detail: the /tmp directory is now mounted by default as tmpfs in RAM. It reduces SSD wear on servers and improves the performance of temporary operations.

Dracut replaces initramfs-tools

The initial ramdisk system is now Dracut by default, replacing initramfs-tools. It uses systemd in the initial RAM disk and natively supports Bluetooth and NVMe over Fabrics, which offers a faster and more efficient connection between storage and servers, in addition to reducing host CPU utilization by applications. If you have very specific scripts or hooks that depended on initramfs-tools, check compatibility.

Chrony and time synchronization

Chrony replaces systemd-timesyncd as the default time daemon, with support for Network Time Security, NTS for short (authenticated and encrypted time), using Ubuntu’s time servers. For high-availability clusters where precise time synchronization is critical, Chrony is the right choice. On the GNOME desktop we can also add other time zones; in my case, since I casually work with the stock market, I am always interested in adding New York and London times to keep stock exchange opening and closing hours in mind.

amd64v3: opt-in performance for modern hardware

If your CPU is more than a few years old and is 64-bit, it probably supports level 3 microarchitecture, which includes AVX2 —which delivers better performance by accelerating operations in parallel— and other modern instructions. Ubuntu 26.04 offers packages compiled for amd64v3 as an opt-in variant. To enable them:

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echo 'APT::Architecture-Variants "amd64v3";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99enable-amd64v3
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Real performance improvements in applications that take advantage of them. No risk: if your hardware does not support it, it simply will not activate.

Cloud, enterprise, and virtualization

For the enterprise and cloud segment, there are several points worth noting.

Confidential Computing

Ubuntu 26.04 supports both Intel TDX and AMD SEV for confidential computing, both as host and guest. Simply put: you can run virtual machines where neither the hypervisor nor the host system can access the VM’s memory. Memory is encrypted at the silicon level.

The most relevant use case is AI workloads on shared infrastructure where the privacy of training or inference data is critical. This is not science fiction: it is infrastructure available today, in a long-supported Ubuntu release.

Authd: cloud authentication without extra infrastructure

Authd, the authentication service with cloud providers, is now in the official Ubuntu repositories. You can authenticate Ubuntu devices with Microsoft Entra ID, Google IAM, or any standard OIDC provider, with no additional infrastructure needed on the network.

For organizations managing fleets of Ubuntu machines that already have centralized identity in Azure or Google, this greatly simplifies onboarding and deployments.

Improved WSL

If for work reasons you are forced to use Windows, Ubuntu’s integration in the Windows Subsystem for Linux improves in this release: better handling of usernames with non-ASCII characters, cloud-init integration, Ubuntu Pro for WSL, and management of multiple machines through Canonical’s Landscape.

Toolchain, flavors, and requirements

Developer toolchain

Ubuntu 26.04 ships a very up-to-date development stack: GCC 15.2, Python 3.14 by default, LLVM 21, Rust 1.93, Golang 1.25, OpenJDK 25 with versions 8, 11, 17, and 21 also available with Java TCK certification.

And an important debut: Zig 0.14.1 is finally in the official Ubuntu repositories. For those who have been following the Zig language as an alternative to C for low-level systems, it is now one apt install away.

Also .NET 10 in the official archive, PHP 8.5 with property hooks and the pipe operator, PostgreSQL 18 with a new I/O subsystem promising up to triple the improvement in disk reads, and MySQL 8.4 LTS, the first official LTS release of MySQL.

Official flavors

If GNOME is not your thing, the flavors are still there. Kubuntu ships with KDE Plasma 6.6. Xubuntu with Xfce 4.20. Lubuntu with LXQt 2.3. There are also Ubuntu Budgie, Cinnamon, Kylin, and Unity, although the latter is not catalogued as LTS and will be released in 2 days.

One absence worth noting: Ubuntu MATE has no 26.04 release. The most direct and similar alternative is Xubuntu.

System requirements

Canonical raised the recommended requirements to 6 GB of RAM and a dual-core 2 GHz CPU. This is not a hard requirement —you can install with 4 GB— but they are being honest about what 2026 workloads demand in practice. The desktop ISO weighs more than 6 GB, so you need a good connection or patience.

When should you upgrade?

The answer depends on your situation.

If you are on Ubuntu 25.10: in the coming days you should see the upgrade notification. You can do it without major risk.

If you are on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS: the direct upgrade is not enabled until July 2026, when Ubuntu 26.04.1, the first point release, comes out. Canonical always follows the same procedure: they wait until post-release bugs are fixed before opening the mass upgrade to LTS users. It is the standard policy and makes a lot of sense.

You can upgrade manually before July if you want, but you take on the risk of bugs that will probably be fixed within weeks.

My recommendation: if it is a production server or a critical work machine, wait for 26.04.1 in July. If it is your personal computer and you want to explore, go ahead, just have a recent backup and free time in case something breaks.

Closing

Ubuntu 26.04 is not a package update. It is a statement of intent.

Wayland as the sole backend in GNOME. Rust in the kernel, in sudo, in the coreutils. CUDA and ROCm in the repos with no external repositories. Kernel 7.0 with 2026 hardware supported from day one. APT with transaction history. Production-ready confidential computing.

And for those of us in the cybersecurity world, seeing the foundation of a mainstream operating system move toward languages with memory-safety guarantees, with hardware-tied disk encryption, with post-quantum cryptography in the default stack, is exactly the direction and standard things should head toward.

This is not a consolidation LTS. It is a transition LTS. And those are the most interesting ones.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” is not a simple package update. It is a change of era. In this analysis I focus on what is under the hood: Rust in the kernel and coreutils, production-ready TPM encryption, post-quantum cryptography, CUDA and ROCm in the official repositories, NTSYNC for gaming, APT with transaction rollback, and much more.

Sources and resources

• Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release notes: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/
• Official Canonical announcement: https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-26-04-lts-resolute-raccoon
• Release announcement on the community forum: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-26-04-resolute-raccoon-lts-released/80833
• Installation images (ISO): https://releases.ubuntu.com/resolute/