Canonical is sticking to Ubuntu Linux releases every six months and a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years, but a new change to their development process is that they are now working to release monthly Ubuntu snapshots of their testing stream.

Ubuntu daily ISOs have always been available as a great trait of Ubuntu Linux for those wanting to test the latest development build of their next release. But now moving forward it will be complemented by monthly snapshots. By leveraging more automation and enhanced testing, Ubuntu engineers are working to deliver monthly snapshots to help in testing Ubuntu moving forward ahead of their six-month releases and two-year LTS releases.

Jon Seager announced the plan a few minutes ago on Ubuntu Discourse for delivering monthly Ubuntu snapshots. Here are some of the key takeaways from that announcement:

"Starting in May 2025, we’re introducing monthly snapshot releases for Ubuntu.

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To aid the Canonical team in their understanding of the existing processes, and the immovable requirements that sit beneath it, we’re introducing monthly snapshot releases for Ubuntu. These will not be fully-fledged releases of Ubuntu, but rather curated, testable milestones from our development stream.

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This doesn’t mean you’ll start seeing Ubuntu versions off the six-month cadence. There will be no Ubuntu 25.07 or 25.08, etc. The monthly snapshots are exactly that: a snapshot of the development of Ubuntu 25.10. Snapshots are not meant for production use, but will help the release team move away from deep institutional knowledge, and toward clean well-documented automated workflows that are transparent, repeatable and testable.

With our current model, failure modes are not detected until they’re urgent and blocking an imminent release. The team conducts rigorous retrospectives on each release, but in my opinion it’s hard to meaningfully evolve such a process when it’s only exercised every six months. The monthly snapshots will create opportunities for us to test, understand and improve the process.

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My ultimate goal is a release system that’s incredibly “boring”: transparent, predictable, observable, and easy to reason about (even when things go wrong).

The new, fully-automated process will likely take several months to complete. When we think we’re done, we’ll do a release that runs both processes in parallel to ensure we get the outcome we expect before finally sunsetting the old process."

More details on the new Ubuntu monthly snapshot releases plan via [1]Ubuntu Discourse .



[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/supercharging-ubuntu-releases-monthly-snapshots-automation/61876