Hey folks, hot on the heels of my Permissions Prompting update, it’s back to business as usual with the final development update for the desktop team ahead of Ubuntu 24.10’s launch next month.
Most things have now landed in the daily images, so there’ll be few surprises here for those who’ve been keeping up with our recent builds (or our friends over at OMGUbuntu or Phoronix) but let’s round them up in one place as we enter the final stretch.
New mascot, old stylings
The Oracular Oriole has been unveiled in all its glory. Check out Aaron’s blog post to view our official wallpapers in a range of dimensions and resolutions, alongside the awesome community wallpaper competition winners.
It was great to see @romactu1’s OG Warty Warthog remaster in particular as it complements a few other anniversary treats we’ve included to tickle those nostalgia bones.
For this release only:
- The original Ubuntu startup sound is back (use audio Settings to disable it)!
- Desktop accent colour options include a special ‘Warty’ brown.
- The Ubuntu logo celebrates 20 years of our favourite Linux Desktop.
- Upscaled remasters of our LTS wallpapers have been added to the universe repository. Download
ubuntu-wallpapers-lts-legacyto relive your old favourites.
Put together, it’s quite special. 
GNOME 47
GNOME 47 has now landed, check out the full release notes here: https://release.gnome.org/47/
GNOME 47 is the latest version of the shell and apps that provide the foundation for much of Ubuntu Desktop. In this release, we are particularly excited to see GNOME officially support accent colours. A preview version of this feature was included in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and 24.04 LTS. In addition the libadwaita and desktop portal file chooser is now powered by Nautilus, improving consistency and adding features.
There are a number of notable advancements in this latest release:
- Stability: The most common crashes have been prioritized and fixed.
- Reliability: Night light, color profile and privacy screen changes are more deterministic.
- Performance: Mouse cursor movement is now smoother on screen and less likely to stutter. We also expect the final piece of accelerated Nvidia secondary GPU support to be merged in the coming weeks.
- Security: Improved integration with Ubuntu’s authd (see below).
- Integration: The ubuntu dock and the gnome shell overview icons now share the same emblems and report snap updates.
Enhanced hardware support:
libfprintadds support for many new fingerprint reader devices.power-profiles-daemonimproves power management for AMD CPUs and GPUs.- Reinstated EGLStreams support means that NVIDIA drivers all the way back to NVIDIA 470 can enjoy Wayland by default.
Some of the above fixes are already finding their way back to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS via stable release updates.
Updates to seeded apps
Eagle eyed viewers will have noticed the addition of a new seeded application: Sysprof is a system-wide statistical profiler for Linux that enables users to measure how much time is spent in each function of an application, down to the system call level.
Combined with the enablement of frame pointers in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and onwards, sysprof will make it easier than ever for performance engineers (including our own) to identify bottlenecks in Ubuntu and the workloads that run on top of the OS.
In other news the App Center continues to receive further polish with improved touchscreen support and the addition of a new Art & Design category on the front page (alongside the elevated promotion of featured snaps). Downloads in-progress are now visible on the App Center’s manage page.
Microsoft EntraID authentication now available with authd on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Authd is our new authentication daemon for Ubuntu that allows direct integration with cloud-based identity providers for both desktop and server. After a great couple of months in beta where we received and resolved a number of feedback items from a wide range of users, it is now generally available as a supported solution in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS via our new PPA.
At launch, authd supports Microsoft Entra ID with additional provider support to come. For more information check out the announce post and latest documentation.
Ubuntu WSL default app upgrade delayed
Ubuntu on WSL offers a range of applications for developers:
- Ubuntu → the primary application, installed by default when users run
wsl --install - Ubuntu Preview → the latest daily builds of Ubuntu, a ‘rolling’ release for edge users.
- Ubuntu 18.04 | 20.04 | 22.04 | 24.04 LTS → dedicated LTS applications.
The primary Ubuntu application upgrades to the latest LTS once the first point release of that LTS is available. Currently the transition of this default app from 22.04.4 → 24.04.1 has been delayed past the standard .1 release date due to some outstanding WSL specific backports to support additional management tooling. We expect to make this transition next month and recommend users take advantage of the dedicated Ubuntu 24.04 LTS application in the meantime which has been available since launch.
If you have questions, issues, requests or simply want to share tips with other Ubuntu WSL users, the dev team has set up a dedicated matrix channel to enable direct discussion!
Ubuntu Core Desktop… KDE??
KDE Akademy attendees may have been surprised to see a talk by Kevin Ottens on a new project called KDE Neon Core. This is an initiative that aims to bring a KDE desktop experience to Ubuntu Core Desktop.
We’ve been partnering closely with Kevin and other talented KDE developers to collaborate on the architecture and design of Ubuntu Core Desktop to fulfill our vision of a truly customisable immutable experience!
The recording of the talk will be available in a few months, but if you want to read more about the inner workings of how to snap a desktop environment, check out his slides. Or tune in to the upcoming Ubuntu Summit where he’ll share more.
Wrapping up for this release
That’s all from me for this cycle, I want to say a huge thank you to the rest of the desktop team and their drive for continuous improvement. It’s their work that has enabled me to fill these posts with so many updates, not to mention the continuous integration and issue resolution that goes on behind the scenes to ensure users get the latest and greatest open source every six months.
I hope you’ll join me in celebrating 20 years of Ubuntu on October the 10th!
