10 Biggest Ubuntu Changes in 2025

The distro also adopted some new desktop apps, bumped technical baselines, and kickstarted some novel new approaches to its own development and testing procedures. ... 2025 was the year Ubuntu began to ‘oxidise’ itself. Ubuntu 25.10 shipped with sudo-rs, a Rust reimplementation of the long-standing sudo command, as well as Rust-based replacements for core command-line utilities like `ls`, `cp`, and `mv`. Rust-*ification* is something of a trend, but Canonical’s motivations aren’t about being cool, but more about security: Rust’s memory-related security benefits forgo cat-and-mouse vulnerabilities that have addle C-based tools for decades. Was the transition smooth? No. Bugs and edge-case issues were introduced, such as auto-updates breaking silently. But the switch is evidence of Ubuntu’s ongoing commitment to evaluating and adopting newer technologies in the distro where it makes sense, based on merit. ... GNOME 48 in Ubuntu 25.04 introduced new screen-time management; options to extend laptop battery lifespan; notification grouping; and HDR support. Canonical’s triple buffering patches *finally* landed upstream to benefit all users of GNOME, not just those on Ubuntu. … ### 3. ... In a move that surprised pretty much nobody who’s been paying attention to the direction of travel, this was the year Ubuntu 25.10 removed the X11 session from its desktop installations. The distro has been using Wayland as its default display server since 2021. Not that this was strictly Ubuntu’s decision. GNOME developers made the decision to disable the ability to run the desktop on X11/Xorg in GNOME 49, and remove the code entirely in GNOME 50. With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS an LTS, making this change early was required. A few folks remain confused by this change and what it means (though most users didn’t notice or don’t care) so to be clear: - **Most software that relies on X11/Xorg will work on Wayland via Xwayland** - **X11/Xorg packages are available in the Ubuntu repositories** Those who can’t or don’t want to use Wayland don’t need to abandon Ubuntu as many flavours continue to ship and default to X11/Xorg, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS supports it fully – with LTS support extended to 15 years, there’s no need to fret. ### 4. Monthly Development Snapshots 2025 saw the Ubuntu engineering team add new ‘Monthly Snapshots’ to its release process. But before anyone (who’d not heard of these prior) gets too excited, this wasn’t news of Ubuntu moving to a rolling release model, with periodical, stable hop-on points. Ubuntu monthly snapshots co-exist with its traditional daily builds, betas and release candidates, rather than act as a replacement to them. What’s different about them is how they’re built. … ### 6. RISC-V RVA23 Baseline Shift In 2025, Canonical made a controversial move with Ubuntu’s support for RISC-V: it raised the distro’s baseline requirements to RVA23, leaving almost all consumer RISC-V hardware on sale incompatible with it. It sounds counterintuitive to reduce the range of hardware the distro can run on, but the motivation sound. … Other Pi-related changes brought a smaller installation footprint with fewer preinstalled apps (since few novices use Pis as their primary desktop PCs, they’re likely aware of what software they need/want), and support for the latest models, like the Raspberry Pi 500+. This was the biggest slice (sorry, not sorry) of attention the Pi has received from Ubuntu in years – and the wider tinkerer ecosystem is all the fruiter for it.