The [1]Ubuntu 25.04 release shipping this month will now feature [2]JPEG-XL image format support out-of-the-box.

For a while now there's been [3]a push to integrate JPEG-XL image format support out-of-the-box in Ubuntu . Finally with Ubuntu 25.04 releasing next week that milestone is being realized after a very last minute landing of the JPEG-XL support in Ubuntu 25.04 by default.

Following last minute feature freeze exceptions finally going through with the [4]release and [5]MIR teams, the Ubuntu 25.04 desktop by default will ship with JPEG-XL support. JPEG-XL is a nice improvement over JPEG with much better compression efficiency and competitive to other modern alternatives like AVIF and WebP. But it has faced some setbacks with [6]Google Chrome having dropped JPEG-XL and adoption of this image format being rather slow.

In any event as Ubuntu desktop engineer Jeremy Bicha at Canonical [7]announced this week, thanks to the last minute efforts JPEG-XL is now found by default for the Ubuntu 25.04 desktop. It's here at last. In prior releases of Ubuntu Linux, JPEG-XL via the "jpeg-xl" package has been available in the Ubuntu Universe archive for those wanting to manually enable JPEG-XL image support.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Ubuntu+25.04

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/JPEG-XL

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.04-No-JPEG-XL

[4] https://launchpad.net/bugs/2099691

[5] https://launchpad.net/bugs/2070882

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FSF-Slams-Google-JPEG-XL

[7] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/desktop-team-integration-squad-updates-monday-7th-april-2025/58671/3