Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS lands with a Wayland-only desktop
The first point release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon consolidates fixes from the April launch, and 24.04 LTS users will soon be offered the upgrade from their own desktops.
Canonical has published Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS, the first point release of Resolute Raccoon, consolidating the fixes and improvements that accumulated after the April launch. It is available to download now, and the more consequential change is the upgrade path Canonical is opening for older installs.
24.04 LTS users are about to be asked to move
Users still on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will shortly be prompted to upgrade to 26.04 LTS directly from the desktop, either automatically or as part of a scheduled update. Canonical confirmed the detail in a post by Richard Ferreira on 29 September. A point release is usually the moment an LTS becomes safe to recommend to cautious users, so pairing the consolidation with an in-place upgrade offer for the previous long-term support release is the real news here.
Wayland finishes the job it started
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships GNOME 50 and completes the upstream shift from X.org to Wayland. That brings per-monitor scaling, native touch and gesture support, the removal of screen tearing and support for the latest NVIDIA production drivers. Fractional scaling and variable refresh rate are no longer flagged as experimental, and GNOME 50 adds faster animations and a tidier workspace.
The default application set has been swapped out as well: Papers for documents, Loupe for images, Ptyxis for the terminal and Resources for system monitoring. Accessibility fixes run across the Shell and the default applications, and the App Center now presents debs and snaps side by side in one place rather than treating them as separate worlds.
CUDA, ROCm and developer tooling in the default install
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is the first release to distribute NVIDIA CUDA natively from its own repositories, with NVIDIA DOCA-OFED available through a PPA and AMD's ROCm platform also landing in the repositories. Toolchains for Python, Rust, Ruby, Go, PHP and Perl are updated, and Workshop provides sandboxed, repeatable development environments for agentic and isolated workflows.
On the security side, TPM-backed full-disk encryption is now generally available in the installer, binding the encrypted disk to a specific device, and the Security Center becomes a control plane for inspecting TPM encryption state, recovery mechanisms, Secure Boot status and disk protection configuration.
Our opinion
The headline feature of a point release is almost never the feature; it is the funnel, and Canonical has just widened its own. Prompting 24.04 LTS users to move in place is a bigger deal than GNOME 50, because 24.04 is the version most fleets standardised on and the one whose support clock people are actually watching. The change that will quietly do the most work is CUDA arriving in the repositories. Every machine-learning workstation build currently begins with a third-party repository and a set of driver pins, and removing that step removes an entire class of support tickets. Wayland being finished matters mostly in reverse: X.org's remaining refuges are now genuinely niche, which means the awkward hybrid period where applications had to choose which session to target is finally closing. The one thing worth eyeing is the automatic upgrade prompt itself, because a point release is a fine time to move and a poor time to be moved without reading the release notes first.