Ubuntu 24.04 development has officially begun – and a codename officially confirmed!

Last week I invited you to share your Ubuntu 24.04 codename predictions. Several of you suggested a numbat, a small, marsupial anteater native to Australia, as an ideal mascot for the next release.

It seems Ubuntu devs are of the same mind as Ubuntu 24.04 is ‘Noble Numbat’ — congrats to all those who guessed correctly! 👍

Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta revealed the name in an e-mail to the Ubuntu development mailing list where (rather more importantly) he also announced that the noble archives are now open for development:

We’re pleased to announce that Noble Numbat is now open for development. Auto-sync has been enabled and will run soon. As usual, we expect a large influx of builds and autopkgtests in this initial period, which will cause delays. Please help with fixing any breakage that occurs.

Opening of the archives means developers can begin submitting packages for inclusion in Ubuntu 24.04.

Next on the ‘new release task list’ will be Ubuntu 24.04 daily builds. These are spun up and made available to download a week or two after development opens. I will (obviously) let you know as soon as those are available to download.

Ubuntu 24.04: Expectations

Ubuntu 24.04 is a long-term support release and these tend to be conservative on major new features, dramatic UI changes, etc and instead focus on a solid, stable experience.

Still, 24.04 will certainly come with a new Linux kernel (either 6.7 or 6.8, based on timing), GNOME 46 (out in March), and I’m expecting further refinements to the installation experience.

Canonical’s Oliver Grawert has also said an immutable, snap-based Ubuntu 24.04 image will be made available to download in April (but it won’t be the default recommended download). I expect we’ll hear more about that effort shortly.

I shared the Ubuntu 24.04 release date yesterday and Ubuntu developers and have publicly confirmed it today by publishing an official release schedule. I’ve updated that article to list a couple of other important dates, such as kernel freeze and UI freeze

What are your hopes, wants, and wishes for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS?