As already reported in the news, Ghostty, a popular terminal-emulator developed and maintained by Mitchell Hashimoto, is now available as a universe package in Ubuntu 26.04. Written in the Zig programming language, Ghostty is fast, feature-rich, uses the platform-native UI and GPU-acceleration.
On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, slated to be released later this week, you may install Ghostty as an APT package:
sudo apt install ghostty
On a successful install, a Ghostty icon should appear in Ubuntu’s built-in app launcher.
Please note that Ghostty is being made available as a preview only. The default terminal-emulator for Ubuntu 26.04 would be ptyxis.
Ghostty package details
Ghostty is available as a universe package on the amd64 and arm64 architectures.
The current packaged version is 1.3.0, which is the latest minor version as of this writing. The upstream project did release a subsequent patch version (1.3.1), which mostly has macOS-related patches.
Ghostty 1.3.0 is built using Zig 0.15. Versioned Zig packages starting from Zig 0.14 have been available on Ubuntu since 25.10.
OpenGL requirements for GPU acceleration
Ghosty 1.3.X requires OpenGL version 4.3 and above. If unavailable, GPU acceleration will not work and the Ghostty fails to launch with this error:
warning(gtk_ghostty_surface): failed to make GL context current: Unable to
create a GL context
warning(gtk_ghostty_surface): this error is almost always due to a library,
driver, or GTK issue
warning(gtk_ghostty_surface): this is a common cause of this issue:
https://ghostty.org/docs/help/gtk-opengl-context
In such environments, ghostty could be launched with environment variable LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE set to true. This causes a fallback to software-based rendering while disabling the GPU acceleration.
To determine the OpenGL version, use:
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version"
This is relevant to the Raspberry Pi, where the required OpenGL version may not be available. As an awkward consequence, ghostty needs to be invoked through another terminal emulator:
LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=true ghostty
A word on libghostty
Upstream releases of Ghostty also include libghostty - a library that lets applications embed their own terminal emulator, offering Zig and C APIs. The current Ghostty package for Ubuntu does not include libghostty. But the concept of a terminal emulator library is very exciting and future package versions will include it as a new binary package.
We’d appreciate feedback, suggestions and bug reports against the preview. Thank you for reading!
) source package and it works fine. Issue is with the binary that is in the repo. May be just a rebuild will fix the issue?!
