Ubuntu doesn't need much of an introduction. It has been a reliable starter distro for people finding their way into Linux for years, and for good reasons as well. It installs without drama, runs on most hardware, and the surrounding community is large enough that almost any problem you run into has already been solved and documented somewhere. I ran it as my daily driver for a while, a few years ago, and the experience was just what I needed at the time. It was fast, familiar for someone coming from Winslop, and stable enough that I wasn't stuck fixing issues every other day.My experience with Ubuntu was what made me go further into the world of Linux and open source, and I still recommend it to anyone who asks me for a distro suggestion.With that said, let's dive into the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon" release right away! 🚀⭐ Ubuntu 26.04 LTS: What's New?Fastfetch output of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.Powered by Linux kernel 7.0, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS comes with five years of standard security and maintenance updates from Canonical, keeping it covered through to April 2031.If that's not enough, Ubuntu Pro stretches that to 10 years of security maintenance across the full Ubuntu archive, taking coverage to April 2036.New Boot AnimationWhen you boot up, you're greeted by a fresh animation that takes cues from the default raccoon-themed wallpaper, with a circular arrangement of sharp lines fanning out like sun rays as the system loads. It flows smoothly and looks clean, in my opinion.If you have a decently specced machine with Ubuntu on an SSD, though, you'll most likely miss it entirely. Which is just fine.GNOME 50This is how GNOME 50 looks on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS!Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships with GNOME 50, making it a four-step jump of major versions from GNOME 46 that came with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. That is not a small gap, and you will feel it in the day-to-day desktop experience.Then there's the matter of X11 being gone from GDM. With this release, GNOME now runs exclusively on Wayland, and there's no session option to go back. Similarly, fractional scaling and variable refresh rate have both graduated out of experimental status and are now stable.The shell also picks up some quality-of-life changes. A power mode indicator shows up in the top bar whenever you're running outside the default profile, so it's visible at a glance, and the volume slider now locks to 100% when over-amplification is on. A couple of long-standing annoyances are fixed too, including deleted default folders reappearing on reboot and a privacy issue where password text was leaking into IM pre-edit fields.The new folder icons on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.The Yaru icon theme also gets a notable refresh in this release. Folder icons have been redesigned with a wider, shorter shape and a more three-dimensional look, complete with depth shading and styled emblems for special folders like Music and Downloads.The Desktop folder icon has been brought in line too, dropping its old desktop-styled motif for a design that looks like a folder. And, when you change your system's accent color, you will notice that folders now fully adopt whatever color you pick rather than just taking on a light shade.Improved App SuiteFrom left to right, we have Ptyxis, Loupe, and Showtime.Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships five new default applications, replacing tools that have been part of the Ubuntu desktop for years.Ptyxis is now the default terminal, taking over from GNOME Terminal. Loupe replaces Eye of GNOME as the image viewer. Papers is the new document viewer in place of Evince, and Showtime now handles video playback in place of Totem.Finally, we have Resources, which replaces the System Monitor and Power Statistics apps as a one-stop dashboard for all your system metrics needs.App Center on the left, Security Center on the right.Then there's the App Center, which was updated with several practical additions. In-progress installs are now visible, snap management has improved across the board, and you can now manage third-party DEB packages directly through it.The Security Center is growing into a proper control panel for system security. It now has an experimental permissions prompting feature, which was first seen in Ubuntu 24.10, giving you more granular control over how snapped applications access your Home directory.It's still experimental and not enabled by default, but it's there if you want to try it.Several bundled applications have also been updated, and these include Firefox 149, LibreOffice 25.8, Thunderbird 140, and GIMP 3.0.Also, if you remember from earlier this year, the Software & Updates app is no longer pre-installed on fresh installs of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and later. This was done in a bid to prevent users from getting exposed to features that were deemed too "dangerous or too complex for normal users."Security BuffsTPM-backed full disk encryption has moved from experimental to being generally available in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Previous releases had this behind a flag, but this time around, Canonical has finally addressed what was holding it back.These are things like recovery key handling during firmware updates being more predictable, documented hardware incompatibilities being clearly flagged, and storage configuration requirements being spelled out.Post-quantum cryptography support is also included via OpenSSH 10.2. The hybrid key exchange algorithm mlkem768x25519-sha256 is on by default, and DSA support has been dropped entirely. With this in place, you don't need to configure anything; it works out of the box.Other ImprovementsWrapping this up, here are some other changes that are worth mentioning:NVIDIA Dynamic Boost is enabled by default on supported laptops.JPEG XL is now supported out of the box, with no additional packages needed.The new NTSYNC driver is included, offering better performance with Windows games running on Wine and Proton.Full support for Intel Core Ultra Xe2 integrated graphics and Intel Arc B580 and B570 "Battlemage" discrete GPUs.There is now an official ARM64 desktop ISO that targets VMs, ACPI + EFI platforms, and Snapdragon-based Windows on ARM devices.If you want to see the new features in action, we have a video on our YouTube channel for you.📥 Download Ubuntu 26.04 LTSThis Ubuntu LTS release is available for download from the official website (for desktop) and the releases portal (for all variants).Ubuntu 26.04 LTSExisting users can refer to our Ubuntu upgrade guide for instructions on how to get this release through the upgrade process. While that guide was made for an older Ubuntu LTS release, the steps should still be relevant.