Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon Released With Kernel 7 & GNOME 50

Canonical released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” on April 23, 2026 — the company’s 11th long-term-support build of Ubuntu, with five years of free security updates through May 2031 and an extended 10-year window through April 2036 for Ubuntu Pro subscribers. The release ships Linux kernel 7.0, a Wayland-only GNOME 50 desktop, Rust-based replacements for several core utilities, post-quantum cryptography on by default and TPM-backed full-disk encryption out of the General Availability box.

What Happened

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced the release on the Ubuntu Discourse thread shortly after the ISOs went live on releases.ubuntu.com/resolute/. All nine official community flavors — including Kubuntu 26.04, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Studio, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Edubuntu and Ubuntu Unity — shipped on the same day, an unusual show of release-engineering coordination compared with previous LTS rollouts.

The headline item for desktop users is the move to GNOME 50 running exclusively on Wayland; the legacy X.org session has been dropped, with XWayland retained for compatibility with older toolkits. Server and cloud users get systemd 259 (which removes cgroup v1 entirely — only the unified cgroup v2 hierarchy is supported), APT 3.2, and Dracut as the new default initramfs generator, replacing initramfs-tools after more than a decade.

Canonical released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on April 23, 2026 with all nine official flavors going live the same day.

Key Details

Kernel and toolchain: Linux 7.0, GNU C Library, GCC, LLVM 19 and the latest Mesa stack — with optional x86-64-v3 packages for newer Intel and AMD CPUs.
Memory-safe core utils: The Canonical-led Oxidation project replaces the GNU coreutils with Rust-based implementations from uutils, plus a Rust sudo (sudo-rs) shipped as the default.
Security defaults: Post-quantum cryptography enabled by default in OpenSSH and TLS, TPM-backed full-disk encryption in General Availability (no longer experimental), and a new Security Center app exposing Livepatch, AppArmor and confinement settings.
Snap permissions: Permission prompting for Snap apps is now enabled by default — closer to the macOS / iOS sandbox model.
Desktop refresh: GNOME 50 brings grouped notifications, HDR support on compatible displays, native multi-touch gestures, per-monitor scaling controls and improved NVIDIA-on-Wayland performance.
Default apps: GIMP 3.2 ships as the default image editor, Resources replaces System Monitor, and the App Center is the unified front-end for both Snap and Debian packages.
Cloud and server: Livepatch updates are now available for Arm-based servers; cloud images for AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud were published the same day.
Support window: Free updates until May 2031; April 2036 with Ubuntu Pro — matching Canonical’s 10-year LTS commitment from the 22.04 cycle.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

The Ubuntu Discourse release thread filled with congratulations within hours, but a few recurring complaints surfaced quickly. The most frequent: NVIDIA proprietary-driver users on older GPUs report flicker and session crashes on the Wayland-only desktop, with workarounds requiring switching to the open-source Nouveau or upgrading the proprietary driver to the 580.x series. On r/Ubuntu, an upgrade from 24.04 LTS in-place worked smoothly for the majority but several users hit boot failures after the systemd 259 cgroup v1 removal — anyone running older container runtimes or custom cgroup configs needs to test before upgrading. Phoronix benchmarks showed the optional x86-64-v3 image delivering 4–10% performance gains on common server workloads, while early Hacker News reaction focused on the uutils default switch — a long-running ideological debate about replacing the GNU coreutils with permissively-licensed Rust equivalents.

What This Means for Developers

If you maintain a Linux deployment, three changes need active attention. First, cgroup v1 is gone — container runtimes and observability tools that still touch /sys/fs/cgroup/{cpu,memory} directly must be updated before upgrading. Second, Dracut replaces initramfs-tools, so any custom initramfs hooks (full-disk encryption, ZFS root, custom keymaps) need to be rewritten. Third, the Rust uutils implementations are largely compatible with GNU coreutils but not bit-identical — scripts that rely on undocumented behavior or specific error messages may break. Server images for AWS, Azure and GCP are tagged 26.04 LTS in their respective marketplaces from launch day; container images on Docker Hub and the GitHub Container Registry use the ubuntu:26.04 and ubuntu:resolute tags.

What's Next

The first point release, Ubuntu 26.04.1, is on the schedule for August 2026 — the standard mid-cycle “safe-to-upgrade-from-24.04” cut-off. The non-LTS interim release Ubuntu 26.10 opens for development this week and will inherit GNOME 51 plus an early preview of systemd-sysext-based image-mode servers. Resolute Raccoon images, source code and torrents are available now from the official releases.ubuntu.com/resolute/ mirror.

Sources

Canonical official release announcement — primary source from the company.
Ubuntu Discourse release thread — community confirmations, bug reports and upgrade discussion.
Official Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release notes — full list of changes and known issues.
releases.ubuntu.com/resolute/ — ISO downloads and SHA256 sums.
Hackster.io coverage — independent analysis of the release.
It’s FOSS feature breakdown — deep-dive into the new defaults and Rust uutils transition.