Ubuntu 24.04.4, the fourth point release of the current LTS was released! Ubuntu developer team announced it on Thursday:

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

The new point release features Linux Kernel 6.17 and Mesa 25.2 backported from Ubuntu 25.10.

Thanks to Kernel 6.17, the new point release includes many new and updated hardware support! They include RX 9070 series fan speed report, AMD Zen 5 desktop processors temperature monitoring, Intel APX support, web camera support on Lunar Lake and Panther Lake laptops, and TDX support in KVM to create hardware-isolated virtual machines.

There are as well support for Apple Touch Bar display, Apple Magic Mouse 2 USB-C, Samsung Snapdragon X, ASUS Zenbook A14 and HP EliteBook Ultra G1q laptops, external DisPlayPort support in ThinkPad T14s and XPS 13 9345, Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld, ThinkEdge SE30 Watchdog, and many other hardware support!

Mesa 25.2, the open-source graphics library and driver stack, features faster AMD RDNA3 and RDNA4 ray-tracing performance, Vulkan Video support for RDNA 4 GPUs, stable support for Intel Xe3 Panther Lake graphics, initial NVIDIA Blackwell support, and many other improvements.

Besides the HWE updates, the new version also added ARL-H gpu support for those who use the original 6.8 Kernel. It updated the libinput library with more touchpad supports in Dell laptops, including 06CB:D01D, 2C2F:0034, and 2C2F:0033.

It as well fixed volume issue on Dell Pro Rugged tablet, Dell Oasis laptops, and Renegade platforms, and speaker mute and mic mute leds on HP ZBook, HP 200 G2a platforms.

Other hardware updates include:

• Support WiFi 6GHz for Philippines on Intel iwlwifi chips.
• Fixed missing Bluetooth firmware for Intel AX203 card.
• Add NVIDIA Grace platform support and 64k page size flavor for 6.8 kernel for GKE.
• Add TI tas2781 support for HP platforms.
• Fixed graphics issues at 4K video playback on AMD Krackan Point 2.
• Support AMD Image Signal Processing (ISP) unit V4.0.
• Add driver to manage PCIe link for NVIDIA ConnectX-7 (CX7) hot-plug/unplug on DGX Spark systems with GB10 SoC.

For Ubuntu Desktop, it added Flamingo Cloud Archive support in Software Properties. And, it backported headless session persistence and fixed NVENC video streaming on blackwell GPUs for Gnome remote desktop.

GDM3, the display manager for login screen, has been updated with auto-login fix when Wayland does not work and remote session persistence backport. And, it added hardware matching rule for devices, such as Dell Gorgon Point, to prefer Wayland in the login screen.

There are as well many Mutter and Gnome Shell fixes, Server side updates including:

• HPE MSA2070 support for multipath-tools.
• Enable ppm module for openldap.
• Add configurable rounds for pw-pbkdf2.so module.
• Fix cannot run AMD-SEV VMs with libvirt.

For more about Ubuntu 24.04.4, see the official release note.

Get Ubuntu 24.04.4

To download the iso images for the new point release, go to Ubuntu website via the link below:

For choice, you may choose a download mirror that near to you for faster downloading speed.

If you’re already running Ubuntu 24.04.3 or earlier point releases on your computer, just launch “Software Updater” and install all the updates to update to the new 24.04.4. And, restart computer to apply changes.

Or, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal or connect to your Ubuntu server and run the commands below instead to upgrade to the new point release.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

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For those who like the old Unity Desktop, there’s new work in progress Linux Distribution features that desktop environment.

It’s Glacia OS, a free open-source Ubuntu based distribution that promotes itself as:

a lightning-fast, secure, and beautifully designed Linux distribution built for developers, creators, and everyday users who demand performance without compromise.

As you may know, Unity was the default desktop environment for Ubuntu, when it was at version range from 11.04 to 17.04.

Unity now is available in Ubuntu through the community maintained universe repository. And, an official flavor, Ubuntu Unity, maintains the desktop environment for Ubuntu users.

However, because of busy life in university, the current Unity maintainer has no time to fix things. The flavor did not publish the 25.10 release due to ISO test issues, and, it missed the LTS qualifications for next 26.04 LTS.

GlaciaOS, as a new choice, is basically an Ubuntu remix. It features a focused application launcher (aka the dash) that can only search and launch installed applications. While, files/folders, documents, settings, and all other searches are removed.

It enhanced the file manager (aka Nemo) with a dedicated “Open in Editor” button to launch current folder with user preferred code editor (e.g., VS Code, intellij), as well as context menu option to send/receive files through SSH (SFTP).

It merged the Unity Tweak Tool and System Settings into a single new Control Center app, and reviewed several indicators such as Bluetooth, date and time, session.

Instead of Firefox, it uses the privacy-focused Brave browser by default with out-of-the-box ads blocker. It as well include VS code editor and following default apps:

• Mailspring email client.
• VLC media player.
• Rhythmbox music player.
• Shotwell photo manager and image viewer.
• Pluma text editor.

No Snap, No Flatpak. And, probably due to early development stage, there’s no even Software App and Update Manager for beginners to install/update apps, though advanced users may use apt command instead.

Try out Glacia OS

For more about Glacia OS, as well as the .iso image, go to its website via the link below:

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• 20 GB disk space.

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