It's been a little over a month since it started Ubuntu 25.04 is in development. As expected, the first Daily Builds are basically the previous version, 24.10, with the developer repositories on which the changes that will arrive next April are added. We are in December, still about four months away from that time, and the operating system does not differ much from Oracular Oriole. But some of the possible details of Plucky Puffin are already known: it could arrive with Ptyxis as a terminal application.
Right now and for some time now, GNOME Terminal is the application for the terminal Ubuntu 24.10, and that hasn't changed yet in 25.04, currently in development. But the Canonical desktop team is debating a change. It explains that Ptyxis would be a recommended replacement for gnome-terminal.
Ptyxis is now offered as an option
The points in which this novelty is dealt with explain that they have "uploaded gnome-console 47 to Ubuntu 25.04 even though the feature of opening new tabs in the current working directory does not work on either Debian or Ubuntu. I hope the Debian bash maintainer will allow the vte2.91 script to be auto-sourced, which would fix this problem for gnome-console and for ptyxis 12, our recommended replacement for gnome-terminal«. Therefore, One of the problems that would cause GNOME Terminal to be replaced would be the tabs.
Ptyxis is a terminal emulator that until not long ago was known as GNOM Prompt, and has focused on performance and functions that work well with the VTE library. Among other things, as seen in the screenshot above, when a privileged command is used, the top bar turns red, something we also see in mobile distributions like Phosh. It also offers themes that can be chosen from the settings.
Although it is already offered as an option in Ubuntu 25.04, it does not appear in the Ubuntu Application Center. If you are interested in trying it out, the best thing to do is open a terminal — the GNOME one, of course — and type sudo apt install ptyxis. After entering the password, the installation will not take long.
Ubuntu 25.04 will arrive in April 2025, with Ptyxis if this proposal goes ahead or with GNOME Terminal if not.