This Week in Open Source
Ubuntu 24.10 is powered by the Linux 6.11 kernel series and uses the latest GNOME 47 desktop environment by default.
Canonical released today Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole) as the latest stable version of their popular GNU/Linux distribution featuring up-to-date components and new features.
Powered by the latest Linux 6.11 kernel series, Ubuntu 24.10 features the latest and greatest GNOME 47 desktop environment for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor with additional patches for Mutter and GNOME Shell to enhance stability and performance. In addition, the Ubuntu Dock now visualizes Snap refreshes and includes better handling for PWAs installed via the Chromium Snap.
Ubuntu 24.10 features a new Security Center app that lets users easily enable or disable the experimental permissions prompting feature for Home directory permissions. In addition, the new Ubuntu release promises improved and optimized Power Profiles Manager to better support newer hardware features, especially for AMD processors.
For NVIDIA users, the Ubuntu 24.10 release defaults to Wayland instead of Xorg on machines using NVIDIA GPUs. Among other noteworthy changes, this release updates support for fingerprint devices and improves the App Center with various enhancements to the Manage page and support for installing third-party DEBs.
Under the hood, Ubuntu 24.10 comes with an updated toolchain that includes GCC 14.2, GNU Binutils 2.43.1, GNU C Library 2.40, LLVM 19, Rust 1.80, Go 1.23, OpenSSL 3.3, systemd 256.5, Netplan 1.1, and .NET 8. The Ubuntu Desktop installer was also updated with support for local file paths for autoinstall import.
Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole) is available for download from the official website as Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu MATE flavors.
Ubuntu 24.10 will be supported for only nine months, until July 2025. If you’re looking for long-term support, you should download and install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat), which is supported until at least 2029.