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Canonical has today released Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed "Plucky Puffin", their latest feature upgrade release to one of the most popular Linux distributions. This also includes updates for all the other editions like Kubuntu. It will be supported for 9 months until January 2026 as this is not a long term support release.
This release has been dedicated to Steve Langasek, who sadly passed away January 1st. As said in the release announcement:
Subscribers to the ubuntu-{devel-}announce mailing list and long term participants in the Ubuntu community will have come across Steve Langasek’s work. Steve, known in the community as vorlon, was a long-term member of the Release team (along with being a member of Archive Admin, Techboard, SRU team, and so on) and a colleague to many of us at Canonical. As a member of the Release team, Steve was responsible for devising many of the processes, policies, and tools which we use today, and teaching his fellow members the ropes. Steve passed away on 1st January 2025 after being unwell for quite some time. The Ubuntu Release Team dedicates 25.04 “Plucky Puffin” to our colleague and friend, Steve Langasek. He is missed and will live in our hearts forever. Thank you for everything, Steve.
I've been running Kubuntu 25.04, since I prefer KDE Plasma, since the Beta release and it has been really smooth. Overall very happy with it as my main choice for my desktop workstation and gaming PC.
Pictured - Ubuntu 25.04
There's a lot of upgrades in this one including Linux kernel 6.14, which includes the new NTSYNC driver for Wine / Proton. Although don't get too excited about it increasing Windows game performance. There's also the new ARM64 Desktop Image, GNOME 48 and lots of assorted software upgrades. For gamers on NVIDIA GPU laptops, you'll be hopefully pleased with NVIDIA Dynamic Boost being enabled by default which should give a bit more performance. Plus there's also support for newer Intel GPUs along with Mesa 25.0.
Installation and upgrades should be easier too. The installer added the option to replace an existing Ubuntu install, and there's better support for dual booting with Windows with BitLocker.
See the release notes announcement for more.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Fester_Mudd a day ago
Nvidia dynamic boost is now default and a fresh kernel. Snaps work great now
dziadulewicz a day ago
Steam's Snap now actually even outperforms the deb one: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/steam-deb-vs-steam-snap-performance-comparison/56811
Kimyrielle a day ago
Linuxer a day ago
Snap store is open source
dziadulewicz a day ago
There is a lot of misinformation spread by Canonical haters. Hard to understand why they waste their energy and just use what they want and prefer ..
Kimyrielle a day ago
Snap store is open source
Unless something dramatically changed last time I checked, the Snap Store is NOT open source.
A quick glance at the Wiki page seems to confirm that nothing has changed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software)
Mind pointing me to a source saying otherwise?
Highball a day ago
Looks like the store is covered there.
scaine a day ago
Unless something dramatically changed last time I checked, the Snap Store is NOT open source.What bit are you looking at? Snap Store is only mentioned once in that Wikipedia entry, and I can't see any mention of its licence there.
A quick glance at the Wiki page seems to confirm that nothing has changed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software)
But should we even care? We use the AUR and trust it. We use Flathub and trust it. But we mustn't use the Snap Store because... why? Proprietary? So is Steam, but here we are on GOL. Hell, GitHub is closed source, which led to Canonical creating Launchpad, which is open source.
And even if the Snap Store IS still proprietary, you can just not use it. Get your Snaps elsewhere. Self-host them. Like you can do with Flathub, but which no-one actually does, because FlatHub is convenient.
Tuxee a day ago
Couldn't agree more with you. When it comes to Snap about half of the Linux world is into running its own backend store. You forgot to mention that we trust the deb packages published by the very same company which apparently runs a completely untrustworthy proprietary Snap store...
Fester_Mudd a day ago
It says also clearly on https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft.io (Snap Store and where the source code is):
"The content of this project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, and the underlying code used to format and display that content is licensed under the LGPLv3"
The thing is actually very clear. That Wikipedia article does not help on this, only confuses.
dziadulewicz a day ago
Every byte of software you run on your computer (gnome-software and gnome-software-plugin-snap) is completely open source, as well as snapd, AppArmor and everything else having anything to do with running a snap on your computer.
The only thing that isn't open source is the backend server that hosts the online repository and updates, which is also completely optional.
So what's the problem here. As noted earlier; why do you Canonical bashers then run for example Steam? You're not making any sense as far as i can tell
tuubi a day ago
What bit are you looking at? Snap Store is only mentioned once in that Wikipedia entry, and I can't see any mention of its licence there.You don't see the license information in the box under the logo? To me it says "GNU GPLv3 (Client & Runtime), proprietary (Backend)[2]".
Technically you could implement your own backend. Maybe there's even an official way to do this as you seem to imply, I wouldn't know or care to find out. But that doesn't change the fact that Canonical's own implementation is proprietary. Or the fact that "host your own" is a disingenuous thing to suggest when it's way more practical to simply use something else.
Whether or not you trust Canonical is up to you, obviously.
It says also clearly on https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft.io (Snap Store and where the source code is):That repository hosts the code for the snapcraft.io website and doesn't include the snap store backend. This doesn't contradict the license information on Wikipedia.
sudoer a day ago
Last edited by sudoer on 18 Apr 2025 at 10:56 am UTC
dziadulewicz a day ago
So the server back end is proprietary, as most websites server that people visit are.
Snap Store, snapd, AppArmor and everything else you run (in means of snaps) are completely open source.
knro a day ago
I got a new X870 motherboard and when I was reading that I needed to compile kernel modules to get things working with Ubuntu, I decided to get Arch and everything worked perfectly out of the box!
dziadulewicz a day ago
Many on GOL too have done that same but eventually for some obvious reason returned to Ubuntu
I recall also LiamD was on Endeavour, then Fedora and now on Ubuntu (Kubuntu).
tuubi a day ago
So the server back end is proprietary, as most websites server that people visit are.
Snap Store, snapd, AppArmor and everything else you run (in means of snaps) are completely open source.
No, that literally doesn't make Snap Store completely open source.
I'm not going to follow this conversation any further as I have no pony in this race. I simply prefer free and open source tech, and don't like it when people (and corporations) try to convince me that there's no difference.
Eike 24 hours ago
@dziadulewicz
So the server back end is proprietary, as most websites server that people visit are.
Snap Store, snapd, AppArmor and everything else you run (in means of snaps) are completely open source.
No, that literally doesn't make Snap Store completely open source.
They said "everything else you run", so there's no contradiction between what you both are saying.
Last edited by Eike on 18 Apr 2025 at 12:00 pm UTC
tuubi 24 hours ago
They said "everything else you run", so there's no contradiction between what you both are saying.You're right, he probably only means the Snap Store client. Which doesn't do anything useful without the proprietary backend.
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