A new LTS on kernel 7.0 and Wayland
Canonical releases Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, code-named “Resolute Raccoon”. The biennial Long Term Support cadence is unchanged; what changes is the technical substrate, aligned with Linux 7.0 — the kernel that consolidated Rust in production drivers and the hardening of io_uring. On the desktop, GNOME runs entirely on Wayland: the X.org session has been removed, completing a migration that began eight years ago with Ubuntu 17.10.
Security: Rust in user space and confidential computing
The Resolute Raccoon user space ships with sudo-rs and uutils coreutils, Rust rewrites of components historically written in C. Canonical’s stated rationale is reducing the classes of memory-related vulnerabilities on privileged tools. The installer also integrates TPM-anchored full-disk encryption, with automatic unlock tied to the machine’s firmware.
For sensitive workloads, the kernel enables by default support for Intel TDX and AMD SEV confidential computing: virtual machine memory is encrypted and attested, reducing the trust required in the host.
Hardware, servers and enterprise tooling
Ubuntu 26.04 makes NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm officially available in the repositories, no longer requiring vendor PPAs or out-of-band packages. Support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (“Panther Lake”) includes the NPU for local inference, while the RISC-V platform is certified on the RVA23 profile, making the same binaries executable across all conformant hardware.
On the server side, this is the first LTS in which Canonical Livepatch also covers Arm64 alongside x86_64: kernel security updates applied without rebooting on ARM servers. For industrial automation, the IgH EtherCAT Master package is now distributed officially, avoiding the need for out-of-tree modules.
The Desktop installer integrates Landscape for fleet management, and cloud authentication is handled by authd, which speaks Microsoft Entra ID, Google IAM and any OIDC provider natively. Ubuntu Pro for WSL can be preconfigured via cloud-init, simplifying provisioning workflows on Windows machines.
What this means in practice
Resolute Raccoon does not introduce a paradigm shift: it makes default in an LTS what was optional or experimental in interim releases — Wayland-only, Rust in privileged tools, confidential computing in the kernel, Livepatch on Arm.
Link: Canonical announcement · Release notes · ubuntu.com/download