Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin): TPM disk encryption, an ARM64 desktop and APT 3.0

Ubuntu 25.04 was released on April 17, 2025 under the code name Plucky Puffin. Like every odd-year April release, it is a non-LTS line with nine months of support (until January 2026) – unlike the April releases of even years (most recently 24.04), which run as LTS with five years of support. Several changes point straight at the next LTS, 26.04, which makes them worth attention even where non-LTS releases are never deployed.

• ▸ TPM-backed full disk encryption right in the installer: the key is unlocked by the TPM chip, not by a passphrase at boot. It is incompatible with Absolute software.
• ▸ Dual boot with Windows handles BitLocker-encrypted partitions, and the installer can replace an existing Ubuntu installation.

• ▸ Linux 6.14 with sched_ext – process schedulers written in eBPF and loaded at runtime – and the NTSYNC driver that speeds up Wine and Proton.
• ▸ systemd 257: System V init scripts are deprecated and go away with 258; services without a systemd unit need converting.
• ▸ The linux-lowlatency package is gone; low latency is now set up by the userspace lowlatency-kernel package on top of the regular linux-generic kernel.

• ▸ APT 3.0 with a new dependency solver.
• ▸ apt-key is gone. Repository keys belong in files and signatures are checked by gpgv; scripts that add keys with apt-key add stop working.

• ▸ An official ARM64 desktop ISO for virtual machines and ACPI/EFI machines, including initial support for Snapdragon X Elite laptops.
• ▸ GNOME 48 with triple buffering; PDFs open in Papers instead of Evince.

GCC 15 (snapshot), Python 3.13, LLVM 20, Rust 1.84, Go 1.24 and OpenJDK 21 as the default.

For deployments where tracking newer package versions is worth more than a longer support window, it is the standard choice between two LTS releases; for production servers the LTS line remains the default choice.