Canonical Celebrates 20 Years of Ubuntu with 24.10 Release

Canonical today announced the immediate availability of Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole, the latest release of its Linux distribution. Based on the Linux 6.11 kernel and GNOME 47, Ubuntu 24.10 is unusually up-to-date, given the normally conservative Ubuntu release philosophy.

“Oracular Oriole sets a new pace for delivering the latest upstream kernel and toolchains,” Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said. “Experimental new security features demonstrate our commitment to continually elevate the Linux desktop experience in conversation with the community for the next 20 years and beyond.”

With Ubuntu 24.10, Canonical is shifting to using the newest Linux kernel release so it can provide customers with the latest features and hardware support at release. It notes that this change will help chipmakers more easily plan for future Ubuntu releases and LTS hardware enablement (HWE) updates.

Ubuntu Desktop 24.10 includes GNOME 47, the latest version of the popular Linux desktop environment. Codenamed “Denver,” GHOME 47 features updated dialog windows, new Open and Save dialogs, an improves Files app, accent color customization, improved support for small displays, hardware encoding for screen recordings, and many other improvements. As important, Ubuntu has now transitioned fully to the Wayland display server, adding native support for Nvidia GPUs.

Ubuntu 24.10 also security improvements, the latest Python, Java, Go, C, C++, Rust and .NET toolchains and runtimes, and the Valkey data store for high performance caching, message queues, leaderboards, and related workloads.

Canonical is also marking the 20th anniversary of Ubuntu. Among other things, it’s made all the wallpapers from each release available for download.

You can download Ubuntu 24.10 from the Ubuntu website. There are Desktop and Server versions, plus various so-called flavors like Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Budgie, Cinnamon, Kylin, MATE, Studio, Unity, and Xubuntu, each of which targets a specific audience.