Ubuntu 24.10 release notes

These release notes for Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu and its flavors.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 24.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 2025. If you need long term support, we recommend you use Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS which is supported until at least 2029.

Upgrades

Upgrades to to Ubuntu 24.10 will refresh seeded snaps to the appropriate snap channels, regardless of what was being tracked before. Snaps that are newly-seeded will be installed during the upgrade. In particular, the following snaps will be installed or refreshed on upgrade:
core24 latest/stable
desktop-security-center 1/stable/ubuntu-24.10
gnome-46-2404 stable/ubuntu-24.10
mesa-2404 stable/ubuntu-24.10
prompting-client 1/stable/ubuntu-24.10
firefox stable/ubuntu-24.10
thunderbird stable/ubuntu-24.10
snapd-desktop-integration stable/ubuntu-24.10 Early upgrades may wish to perform these updates manually.

New features in 24.10

Updated Packages

OpenSSL 3.3

OpenSSL has been updated to version 3.3 with large performance and scalability improvements compared to openssl 3.0. It is now also loading configuration dropins from /etc/ssl/openssl.conf.d for easier customisation.

Linux kernel 🐧

Ubuntu 24.10 includes the new 6.11 Linux kernel that brings many new features. Crash dumps are now enabled by default for desktop and server installations. Please refer to the Ubuntu Server Kernel crash dump documentation for complete details. Detailed changes are reported in the Oracular Kernel Release Notes post.

systemd v256.5

The init system was updated to systemd v256.5. See the upstream changelog for more information about individual features. To highlight a few things:

Support for cgroup v1 (‘legacy’ and ‘hybrid’ hierarchies) is now considered obsolete and systemd by default will refuse to boot under it. To forcibly reenable cgroup v1 support, SYSTEMD_CGROUP_ENABLE_LEGACY_FORCE=1 must be set on kernel command line.
Support for System V service scripts is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please make sure to update your software now to include a native systemd unit file instead of a legacy System V script to retain compatibility with future systemd releases.
When sshd is installed on a system, a new systemd generator, systemd-ssh-generator binds a socket-activated SSH server to local AF_VSOCK and AF_UNIX sockets under certain conditions. See the man page for more details. Note that this feature is different and indendent from sshd-socket-generator which is shipped in Ubuntu’s openssh-server package.
Ubuntu now ships upstream systemd’s tmp.mount by default. In effect this means that /tmp is now a tmpfs by default.
cryptsetup tools such as systemd-cryptsetup, systemd-cryptenroll, systemd-veritysetup, and more, have been split into a new systemd-cryptsetup package to reduce dependencies pulled in by the main systemd package. This new package is only listed as a Suggests, so if this functionality is used ensure that either Suggests are installed or that it is manually installed.
Ubuntu’s systemd-networkd no longer sets UseDomains=true for managed network interfaces. In effect, this means that search domains configured in DHCP leases will not be reflected in /etc/resolv.conf by default. This change aligns Ubuntu’s default behavior with that of upstream. System administrators may choose to override this default on a global, or per-interface basis. See systemd.network for details.

Netplan v1.1 🌐

The new version 1.1 of Netplan introduces a custom systemd-networkd-wait-online logic, waiting for link-local addresses and one routable interface, as described in the https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/spec-definition-of-an-online-system/27838. Besides improvements to the embedded-switch-mode setting for SR-IOV devices, the introduction of parser flag to skip broken configurations and fixes for ProtonVPN and Microsoft Azure Linux.

Toolchain Upgrades 🛠️

GCC 🐄 is updated to 14.2, binutils to 2.43.1, and glibc to 2.40.
Python 🐍 is updated to 3.12.7
LLVM 🐉 now defaults to version 19
Rust 🦀 toolchain defaults to version 1.80
Golang 🐀 is updated to 1.23
.NET 9 🤖 now available, .NET 8 support extended to IBM Power
OpenJDK ☕ versions 23 and 24 (early access snapshot) are now available

OpenJDK

OpenJDK 21 is still the default. OpenJDK 23 is included as an optional OpenJDK. An early access snapshot of OpenJDK 24 is also included. Support for OpenJDK LTS versions 17, 11 and 8 is being maintained. OpenJDK 21 and OpenJDK 17 packages are now TCK (Technology Compatibility Kit) certified on amd64, arm64, s390x, ppc64el and armhf. The Java TCK is the most comprehensive test suite that covers all aspects of Java SE specification including language features, libraries and APIs. This guarantees interoperability and conformance to standard.

.NET

With the release of .NET 9, Ubuntu reinforces its commitment to supporting the .NET community. .NET 9 is fully supported on Ubuntu 24.10 and is also available for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) through the .NET Backports PPA. In addition, we have expanded .NET support to the IBM Power platform for both .NET 8 and .NET 9, further broadening the platform’s reach. We are also excited to introduce the new and improved .NET Snap, allowing developers to seamlessly install any supported version of .NET on any Ubuntu system.

Default configuration changes ⚙️

As always there are many changes to defaults, mostly by newer versions of packages. But a few are worth spelling out if your former automation, configuration and tuning relied on those settings being one or the other way.

Ubuntu Desktop

Installer and Upgrades

The desktop installer now support local file paths for autoinstall import.
Power Profiles Manager has been improved and optimized to support better newer hardware features (especially AMD), can now support multiple optimization drivers and is now battery-aware to automatically increase the optimization levels when running on battery only.
fprintd has been updated and libfprint supports now many other fingerprint drivers and devices.

Store

The App Center now includes improvements to the Manage page including:

Installs in progress
Improved self-update handling
Messaging for running snaps
Direct uninstall of snaps from the manage page
Scrolling support for touch screens Third party deb installation is now also supported.

Security Center

A new Security Center is included. It features the ability to easily enable or disable a new experimental permissions prompting feature for Home directory permissions.
More features will be added in future Ubuntu releases.
Prompting is also supported by an additional seeded snap, prompting-client, for permissions prompt handling.

20th Anniversary Celebration

20 years ago, the first version of Ubuntu was released, Ubuntu 4.10 “Warty Warthog”. We are celebrating this monumental anniversary with several temporary flourishes

The return of the original startup sound, which can be disabled via Settings > Sound
A ‘Warty’ brown accent colour that can be enabled in Settings > Appearance > Style
An anniversary logo

GNOME 👣

GNOME has been updated to include new features and fixes from the latest GNOME release, GNOME 47.
In GNOME Shell and Mutter, Ubuntu includes additional patches to enhance stability and performance, which have not yet been merged upstream.
The Ubuntu dock now visualises snap refreshes and includes better handling for PWAs installed via the Chromium snap.

Default app changes

The Sysprof app is installed by default as a new system utility. This makes it easier to discover performance issues in your apps.

Updated Applications

Firefox 130 🔥🦊
LibreOffice 24.8 📚
Thunderbird 128 “Supernova” 🌩️🐦

Updated Subsystems

BlueZ 5.77 💙
Cairo 1.18.2 👁️⃤
Noto Color Emoji Font 2.047 with Unicode 16 support 🥳
NetworkManager 1.48 🖧
Pipewire 1.2.4 🔊
Poppler 24.08 📝
xdg-desktop-portal 1.18 ⛩️

Nvidia

Ubuntu 24.10 now defaults to Wayland instead of Xorg on machines using Nvidia graphics. If you require Xorg instead then select ‘Ubuntu on Xorg’ from the session menu on the login screen.

Ubuntu WSL

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Ubuntu Server

Apache2

Apache2 has been updated from Noble’s 2.4.58 to the current 2.4.62, and some of the more noteworthy changes include:

htpasswd: Add support for passwords using SHA-2.
core: Allow mod_env to override system environment vars.
mod_xml2enc: Update check to accept any text/ media type or any XML media type per RFC 7303, avoiding corruption of Microsoft OOXML formats.
mod_ssl: SSLProxyMachineCertificateFile/Path may reference files which include CA certificates; those CA certs are treated as if configured with SSLProxyMachineCertificateChainFile.
mod_ssl: Improve compatibility with OpenSSL 3, including handling when OPENSSL_NO_ENGINE is set and support for loading certs/keys from pkcs11.
mod_proxy: Ignore (and warn about) enablereuse=on for ProxyPassMatch when some dollar substitution (backreference) happens in the hostname or port part of the URL.
mod_proxy: Add optional third argument for ProxyRemote, which configures Basic authentication credentials to pass to the remote proxy.
mod_md: Certificate renewals are triggerable using OCSP stapling information. For more details, please see the full set of changes.

Clamav

Clamav is updated from version 1.0.5 to 1.3.1 in Oracular, bringing significant improvements and changes, including:

Added support for extracting and scanning attachments found in Microsoft OneNote section files.
Added support for extracting Universal Disk Format (UDF) partitions.
Added a –cache-size option to customize the size of ClamAV’s clean file cache, which may improve scan performance at the expense of more RAM.
Introduced a customizable SystemD timer for running Freshclam updates, without sending Freshclam into the background.
Refined limit handling for large files
Added ability for Freshclam to use a client certificate PEM file and a private key PEM file for authentication to a private mirror
Added the ability to extract images embedded in HTML CSS blocks.
Enhancements relating to VBA extraction from office documents
Added support for aborting on standup if virus database is older than a configured number of days. For a comprehensive listing of changes included since Ubuntu Noble, please see the changelogs for 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.3.0, and 1.3.1.

Chrony

The chrony package in Oracular was changed to no longer ship the default Ubuntu NTP pools in /etc/chrony/chrony.conf. A new snippet configuration file is created in /etc/chrony/sources.d/ubuntu-ntp-pools.sources defining those servers. The motivation for this change is explained in LP: #2048876. If you changed your chrony.conf, an upgrade to this version will stop at a dpkg config prompt, showing the differences between the installed file and the new one. If you chose to keep the existing chrony.conf, keep in mind that the Ubuntu NTP pools from /etc/chrony/sources.d/ubuntu-ntp-pools.sources will also be used. @ankushpathak wrote a great post about this change: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/improving-chrony-time-source-configuration-in-ubuntu/47850

cloud-init v. 24.3.1

Notable features beyond v. 24.1 present in Noble:

Bootspeed improvement: support for socket-based shared python process across cloud-init boot stages (#5595)
NoCloud support for FTP and FTP over TLS (#4834)
Add network-config seed support for nocloud datasource (#5566)
Network v2 schema validation (#4892)
Add support for disk setup of nvme devices (#5263)
Support remote URI sources write_files module (#5505) …

Ubuntu 24.10