All our editions feature: Firefox 131.0.3, LibreOffice 24.2.5.2, Thunderbird 128.3.1. For audio and video multimedia playback, we offer software out-of-the-box that caters specifically to our desired experience for each edition. Budgie and GNOME editions ship with Rhythmbox for audio playback, with the latest release of the Alternate Toolbar extension to provide a more modern user experience. Budgie and GNOME ship with Celluloid for video playback. Xfce ships with Parole for multimedia playback. Plasma ships with Elisa for audio playback and Haruna for video playback. Over the summer, the Solus team has been tackling the Usr-Merge conundrum; read Evan’s excellent blog post for the full story. We have now reached the end of Stage 3 on our rollout plan: All users with an updated system now have a Usr-Merge’d system. Any users that create a fresh installation with today’s ISOs will also have a merged system.
The underlying GNU/Linux operating system has been upgraded, this release is based on the Debian 'Sid' repository as of 2024-07-15; the Linux kernel has updated to 6.11.2; removed wireless-tools from live system since it's not available in package repository; the iw package should have same function and it is already included in live system; the reiser4progs package was removed from live system; ocs-scan-disk - use lsblk so the code is neater; the block device with file system (e.g. sda with the NTFS file system) can be correctly shown now; merged zstd and zstdmt, use 'zstd -T0' by default; some extra_zstdmt_* variables are dropped, including extra_zstdmt_opt, extra_zstdmt_dc_opt, extra_zstdmt_opt_onthefly and extra_zstdmt_dc_opt_onthefly; it will be easier for user to customize that using boot parameters; now only available variables for zstd are extra_zstd_opt, extra_zstd_dc_opt, extra_zstd_opt_onthefly and extra_zstd_dc_opt_onthefly.
bslx-6.11.3-1-2024.10.12-x86_64 has been released and is available for download.
The new release 24.04.1.4 of Starbuntu includes improvements to the CPU usage of Starbuntu-specific daemons. In addition, some GTK themes have been added and the graphical user interface has received a new design.
Hello fellow educators and students! We've updated Edubuntu with a new wallpaper and added some security features in-line with Ubuntu desktop. We are excited for these small, but mighty changes to help you get the most out of Edubuntu. New Features: we have changed our default wallpaper for this and the next two releases, this will distinguish these releases for this LTS cycle until the next LTS; this release includes GNOME 47; like Ubuntu Desktop, Edubuntu now includes the Permissions Prompting and the Security Center. This release is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. We didn't have much time this cycle to work through our applications and determine which applications are out there to add new ones, so there's not much new in terms of new applications this cycle.
We have now implemented minimal installations in the system installer. This will let you install a minimal desktop to get going and then install what you need via Ubuntu Studio Installer. This will make a faster installation process and lets you customize what you need for your personal Studio. Unfortunately, at least for the time being, we also had to get rid of the default shortcuts in the panel since it would cause an error when loading without the applications being installed. A solution for this is coming in 25.04. The generic Ubuntu kernel is now fully capable of low-latency workloads. As such, with this release, we have switched from the low-latency kernel to the generic kernel with the boot options to enable the low-latency configuration enabled by default.
Ubuntu Kylin 24.10 is integrated with the 6.11 kernel. It also has upgraded some desktop environment components to UKUI4.0 with many new features. The basic library, subsystem, and core software have also been upgraded to improve overall system stability and compatibility, It will bringing a better experience to user! New features: Kernel 6.11 - Ubuntu Kylin 24.10 includes the new 6.11 Linux kernel that brings many new features. AMD performance enhancements and optimizations. Intel performance optimizations and Lunar Lake device support. Enhanced support for AI accelerators. Improvements in RISC-V related functionalities. Virtualization and filesystem upgrade improvements. Support for developing drivers using Rust language. Enhanced support for new hardware such as Chromebook, Snapdragon, etc. Enhancements to the io_uring subsystem. Reduction in real-time kernel latency. Enhanced KVM virtualization support. Enhancements to system calls and APIs.
Ubuntu Unity 24.10 continues to use Unity 7.7, and has seen a move away from unity-greeter as a result of some bugs discovered only a short while before the release (after the archive freezes) to lightdm-gtk-greeter; we continue to use LightDM, of course (this bug also affected other flavours of Ubuntu that used unity-greeter atop LightDM). As with Ubuntu Unity 24.04, the 24.10 installation images use Calamares. We would like to thank Simon Quigley and Aaron Rainbolt for integrating Calamares with our existing Ubuntu Unity live session, and last-minute fixes for bugs reported prior to the final release.
Ubuntu 24.10 features the latest Linux 6.11 kernel for improved performance and hardware support, marking a shift to a more aggressive kernel version selection policy going forward. Building on our previous LTS efforts around performance engineering, Ubuntu 24.10 now includes kdump-tools on relevant platforms for automatic kernel crashdumps. The default desktop installation also includes sysprof for application and workload profiling. Ubuntu Desktop delivers GNOME 47 with improvements to performance, user experience and enhanced touchscreen support. The power-profiles-daemon improves power management for AMD CPUs and GPUs while libfprint adds support for many new fingerprint reader devices. Ubuntu Desktop now defaults to Wayland on devices with NVIDIA graphics cards and defaults to the NVIDIA 560 open driver version.
Lubuntu 24.10 is the first release of Lubuntu to ship with a primarily Qt 6-based environment. Previous LXQt releases used Qt 5. Due to this upgrade, modern Qt 6-based apps such as the latest versions of VirtualBox, qBitTorrent, and more will now be themed similar to the rest of the desktop. Qt 5 app theming also still works, allowing you to continue to use apps that haven't caught up with Qt 6 yet. Lubuntu-specific applications (namely Lubuntu Update and the Lubuntu Installer Prompt) have also been updated to use Qt 6. The Calamares installer continues to use Qt 5 however. We expect to switch Calamares to using Qt 6 for Lubuntu 25.04. For a while now, Lubuntu has been using the Breeze theme from KDE Plasma. While this has worked well enough for a while, it has had some incompatibilities with LXQt crop up before, and this cycle it happened again. Rather than continuing to make a KDE component work where it wasn't really designed to, Lubuntu 24.10 now ships with Kvantum theming.