Lubuntu 25.04 It's now available. It's one of those releases where much of the new stuff isn't visible, but it's felt. In these cases, I'm reminded of my years as a Mac user: my iMac came with a system called Leopard, which I had no complaints about, but then they released Snow Leopard with only optimizations, and then I learned that something good can be even better if you polish it up.
That is one of the points we can draw from the release notes from Lubuntu 25.04: «In this release we have focused on something simple: stabilize, refine and refresh«. Among these refinements we find a new version of Qt point, specifically Qt 6.8.3. In the previous one they included point-two, and with this they gain stability.
Lubuntu 25.04 paves the way for the future of the distro
On the other hand, they've spent a lot of time working on the installer, their own Calamares-based installer that also supports Kubuntu and Ubuntu Unity. Unfortunately, many of these improvements haven't made it to Plucky Puffin in time, so Lubuntu 25.04 has reverted to the 24.10 installer.
They've also spent the last few months preparing the next LTS release (26.04), and they have two goals they want to achieve: first, to upgrade as much software as possible from Qt5 to Qt6; and second, to prepare Lubuntu to be fully compatible with Wayland.
Along the way, they've made some changes, such as changing the default menu to Fancy. Otherwise, it shares the same basic changes as the rest of Puffins:
- Launch of normal, provisional or cycle interim, which means it will be supported for 9 months, until January 2026.
- Linux 6.14.
- Updated base packages:
- systemd 257.4.
- Table 25.0.x.
- PipeWire 1.2.7.
- Blue Z 5.79.
- Gstreamer 1.26.
- Power Profiles Daemon 0.30.
- Open SSL 3.4.1.
- GnuTLS 3.8.9.
- Python 3.13.2.
- GCC 14.2.
- glib 2.41.
- binutils 2.44.
- Java 24 GA.
- Go 1.24.
- Rust 1.84.
- LLVM 20.
- .Net 9.
- Libre Office 25.2.2.
- Improvements to AppArmour.
Updates from Lubuntu 24.10 will be activated in the coming days. For new installations, you can download the ISO image from the button below.