Ubuntu 21.10 Likely Sticking To The GNOME 40 Desktop

While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41.

GNOME 41 will be out in September (as usual) as the latest half-year update to this open-source desktop. Especially being one cycle ahead of an LTS release, normally Ubuntu's desktop would very much be on the latest and greatest GNOME version at the time, but that doesn't look like it will be the case for Ubuntu 21.10.

When asked about the GNOME version for Ubuntu 21.10 for knowing whether to work on chery-picking fixes to back-port to GNOME 40, Canonical's Sebastien Bacher wrote this morning:

Ideally we would have updated to 41 but feature freeze is today and we didn’t really have the resources available for the update. If you want to update some components please do, otherwise we can still request exceptions for selected updates

So due to lack of desktop resources this cycle, it's looking like GNOME 40 is it for this next Ubuntu release but with the possibility of some individual GNOME 41 components being pulled in.

GNOME 41 is currently up to a beta state but the release candidate is coming down in early September while the official GNOME 41 release is planned for 22 September. The GNOME 41 cycle has been relatively quiet with not too many big changes but some items worth mentioning like libadwaita.