Ubuntu 24.10 To See More Polishing, NVIDIA Wayland By Default & New Welcome Wizard

Oliver Smith who is serving as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical has shared some roadmap plans around Ubuntu 24.10. With this being the first post-LTS release following last month's Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support, they are more free to innovate this cycle and they have a lot of great plans for enhancing the Linux desktop experience.

Oliver on a post on the Ubuntu Discourse outlined today some of their Ubuntu 24.10 plans. Right now these are just plans but hopefully most - if not all - of them will manage to materialize in time for the Ubuntu 24.10 release.

Ubuntu 24.10 will spend a lot of time polishing existing features and new code that was merged into Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Oliver chimed that it's "polish, polish, polish."

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS had planned for TPM-based full disk encryption support but that expanded hardware encryption support didn't materialize for that Long Term Support cycle. Now that's the goal for Ubuntu 24.10 to have TPM-backed full disk encryption available for those who want it to complement the existing Ubuntu disk encryption options.

Additionally, the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop is hoping to deliver a new full-featured first boot experience. Canonical wants to redesign their welcome wizard to improve the initial Ubuntu desktop experience moving forward.

Ubuntu 24.10 also aims to see improvements to its App Center, support for third-party Debian package installations from the GUI should land soon as a notable absence from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. There will also be yet more work around Snaps integration.

Ubuntu 24.10 will also see more work around leveraging Google's Flutter toolkit. The hope too is to see the transition of Flutter from GTK3 to GTK4.

Another change Canonical engineer is looking at for Ubuntu 24.10 is Wayland by default for NVIDIA graphics. GNOME 47 should be in great shape with its Wayland support and the hope is that the NVIDIA proprietary driver support will be in super shape come October.

Some other Ubuntu 24.10 work items include continued work on the immutable Ubuntu Core Desktop, 20th anniversary Easter Eggs, continued Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) enhancements, and more. Canonical is also planning on growing the Ubuntu Desktop team by "at least another 50%" over the next year.

Learn more about the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop plans via Ubuntu Discourse.