Canonical Launches Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon," Its Latest Long-Term Support Linux Distro
New version moves to Wayland as standard, includes performance and security improvements, and offers support through to 2041.
Canonical has announced the release of the latest long-term support (LTS) version of its Debian-derived Ubuntu Linux distribution: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon."
"Ubuntu 26.04 LTS sets the example for providing best-in-class resilience while simultaneously embracing innovation and the advancement of open source," claims Canonical's vice-president of Ubuntu engineering Jon Seager of the new release, which follows the company's usual cadence. "By combining optimizations for silicon, the kernel, and the cloud with the latest upstream features, we're delivering on our goal to bring the very best of open source to Ubuntu on whichever platform you choose."
Ubuntu — named for the Bantu word for "humanity" and the philosophy it describes — was born in 2004 when Mark Shuttleworth founded Canonical and hired developers who had been working on the Debian Linux project. The first version was released in 2005, and the company has since settled on a six-monthly release cycle with long-term support variants released every two years. 2026 is an LTS year, and as a result Ubuntu 26.04 LTS — codenamed "Resolute Raccoon" — will receive updates through to May 2031, with Ubuntu Pro subscribers receiving extended security maintenance to April 2036 expandable to April 2041 with the paid-for "Legacy Add-On" support contract.
The new release moves to the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment running atop Wayland — a shift away from the classic X.org display server/client architecture previously used, bringing with it the promise of improved visuals including per-monitor scaling controls, native touch and gesture support, and optimized performance. Accessibility has also been improved, Canonical claims, and introduces a new unified App Center for software management.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS also follows Canonical's expanding partnerships with chipmakers, launching with native support for NVIDIA's CUDA and AMD's ROCm general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) offload engines. It also brings the promised shift to requiring that devices based on the free and open source RISC-V architecture use the RVA23 standard or higher — described by Canonical as a "baseline standard." Other changes include boosted performance for the Intel Xe3 graphics graphics family, memory safety improvements, full-disk encryption with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) support in the installer, and updates for using Ubuntu via Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
More information is available in Canonical's release notes, while the server, desktop, and WSL variants of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS are available to download now on the Ubuntu website.