Ubuntu 24.04 LTS enters feature freeze period and is expected to be officially released on April 25

Ubuntu24.04LTS "NobleNumbat" has entered the function freeze period and will be officially released in April. During this period, the focus will shift from feature development to bug fixes.However, with access to feature freeze exceptions, some candidate new features may still appear. It is expected that the version upgrade of Ubuntu24.04 will be equipped with Linux6.8, while the current kernel of Ubuntu23.10 is still V6.5.

Ubuntu24.04LTS includes Mesa24.0 graphics driver, GCC13 stable series compiler, GNUBinutils2.42, Glibc2.39 and a large number of other software updates.

Ubuntu 24.04 also has some nice updates to its desktop installer, improvements to Thunderbird Snap, and more.

With today's release, Ubuntu 24.04LTS officially enters the feature freeze period. According to the Ubuntu 24.04 schedule, the user interface will be frozen on March 21, kernel functions will be frozen on March 29, hardware functions will be frozen on April 1, and the Ubuntu 24.04 beta will be released on April 4. If all goes well, Ubuntu 24.04LTS will be officially released on April 25.

Ubuntu24.04LTS does not support JPEG-XL by default

It had been hoped that the Ubuntu 24.04 desktop would support the JPEG-XL image format, but this will not become a default change.

Canonical Desktop Software Engineer Jeremy Bicha wrote in a status update this week: "I realize that we will not be able to include JPEGXL support in the default installation of Ubuntu Desktop in 24.04LTS, but there is still time to update the libraries in the universe so that gdk-pixbuf support is installed.

Therefore, users may be able to install JPEG-XL support from the Ubuntu Universe tarball, but it seems that it has not been approved as part of the default installation of Ubuntu desktop.

This is another dramatic incident after Google removed JPEG-XL from the Chrome browser a year ago. JPEG-XL is a royalty-free graphics file format designed to be a universal replacement for existing lossy and lossless compressed raster graphics formats. The file format and encoding system have been standardized for two years.

We are very much looking forward to seeing Ubuntu 24.04 equipped with the new Linux 6.8 and releasing a stable version in the next week or two.