Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has shared its timetable for Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole with the community. The schedule states that a beta release will be made available on September 19 before a release candidate on October 3 and the final release on October 10.
What’s important to keep in mind with Ubuntu 24.10 is that it’ll only receive updates for nine months before being discontinued. If you’re looking for a more peaceful experience then choosing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS would be a better option as you won’t need to do any upgrades until 2029.
The key dates according to the schedule are as follows:
- August 15 - Feature Freeze
- September 5 - User Interface Freeze
- September 19 - Beta
- September 26 - Kernel Freeze
- October 3 - Final Freeze, Release Candidate
- October 10 - Final Release
If you do have time on your hands and like messing about with operating systems on a test machine, you’ll be able to download daily builds of Ubuntu 24.10 but do note that they can be extremely unstable. The daily release on September 6, for example, should have the desktop exactly as it will look when the final release comes out.
One of the main benefits of Ubuntu 24.10 will be that it’ll have newer software packaged with it. This is ideal if you have brand new hardware that’s not supported in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. It’s not known what kernel will ship with it but Phoronix predicted it’ll include Linux 6.11, GNOME 47, and the GCC 14.1 compiler but we’ll need closer to launch for this to be confirmed.
If you’re not too familiar with Ubuntu, it’s an alternative operating system to Windows and macOS that’s available for free and supports lots of hardware, even older hardware. It’s the most popular version of Linux and was created in 2004 in a bid to make Linux more accessible to the average user.
Source: Ubuntu Discourse