Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta announced today on the behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team that the [1]Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" has entered its feature freeze.

This signals the shift from feature development to bug fixing. But as usual, feature freeze exceptions can be granted and typically do occur especially for features that Canonical is interested in getting into this next Long Term Support (LTS) Release. The announcement of the Ubuntu 26.04 feature freeze can be found on the [2]ubuntu-devel-announce list .

[3]

Ubuntu 26.04 is set to ship in April with the leading-edge Linux 7.0 kernel. On the desktop side will be GNOME 50 by default and all of its latest upstream improvements. Plus Ubuntu 26.04 is using the GCC 15 compiler and other updated toolchain components, ROCm will be found in the package archive, OpenJDK 25 will be the default Java version, GNOME Resources is the new default system monitor, and many other package updates and enhancements.

Next up is the UI freeze on 12 March, the beta release at the end of March, the kernel freeze on 9 April, and the official release slated for 23 April.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Ubuntu+26.04

[2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2026-February/001389.html

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=ubuntu_2604_snapshot_3_lrg