Keepers of Noble Numbats to be offered a Resolute Racoon: Ubuntu 26.04.1 is coming

It looks like the Racoon has bedded in and settled down, as Canonical releases the first point release of this year’s Ubuntu LTS version, offering an upgrade to users on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat). Ubuntu 26.04.1 is the first point release of April’s long-term support version, which will be supported until 2031. Assuming that it follows the pattern of previous Ubuntu LTS releases, 26.04.1 will be followed by four further point releases – usually, the final release comes a little while after the following LTS release. That means Ubuntu 26.04.5 should arrive some time after Ubuntu 28.04 - meaning in or around September 2028. It’s accompanied by most of the remixes releasing matching point releases: Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, and Ubuntu Cinnamon. Notably, two flavors are missing from this list. There are 10 official flavors but only eight point releases lists. There was no official 26.04 release of Ubuntu MATE. Maintainer Martin Wimpress has stepped down – he has a new project called Nøughty Linux he’s working on instead. There’s not much to see on the website yet, but if you’re curious, his talk at the 2025 Ubuntu Summit will give you a taste. Ubuntu Unity isn’t in that list, either. That remix missed the 25.10 release cycle because lead developer Rudra Saraswat – whom we first talked to in 2022, when he was 12 – is at university. The good news is that some developers did step up to help and there is an Ubuntu Unity 26.04 release. It replaces a bunch of subcomponents of the previous version, though, and that means it’s officially not an LTS release. Ubuntu Unity users should be aiming for the 26.10 release instead. This first point release has a few consequences we can expect. One is that for LTS users, it’s upgrade time, if you are planning on trying to stay current. Canonical does not start offering new version upgrades to LTS users until the first point release. Now that Raring-point-one is here, people running Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” will start to see offers to upgrade to the new version. This applies to those running their Ubuntu servers as pets, rather than herding them like cattle. One of the things that really crumples the cardigans of hardcore Debianisti is that Canonical inserts messages into the output of the apt command. So the upgrade offers won’t be limited to graphical desktop users. Another consequence, albeit less concerned with any of the official flavors, is that System 76’s Pop!_OS 26.04 is expected soon. The company said on LinkedIn that they were aiming for an end-June release date. That didn’t happen. The team is certainly hard at work. Its in-house COSMIC desktop hit version 1.0 in December last year, and earlier this week, it released COSMIC version 1.7.0. That means that the next Pop!_OS will now use Ubuntu 26.04.1. The Reg FOSS desk is becoming quite fond of COSMIC and Pop!_OS, after a fairly shaky start. It feels quite a bit faster than Ubuntu itself, and on our newer testbed laptop – a 2018 Dell XPS13 – it’s not only very fast to start, but its ability to change the screen DPI on the fly is very handy. On older kit, it can make effective use of NVIDIA GPUs that the official binary driver can no longer use on modern kernels, although we have seen it freeze up quite a few times on those 10-15 year old machines. COSMIC is new and it’s developing faster than any other desktop in the Linux world. The team has ambitious plans for “Epoch 2” and beyond. At the rate they’re moving, perhaps Pop!_OS 26.04 will come with COSMIC 2. ®