Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Enters Its Feature Freeze

Now rolling into March, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS "Noble Numbat" has entered its feature freeze period ahead of its official release in April.

With this the focus shifts from feature development to bug fixing. However, some lingering features may still land -- they just need to go the route of securing a feature freeze exception. Among the version bumps still expected to happen is Ubuntu 24.04 likely to ship with Linux 6.8 while at the moment is still on the v6.5 kernel like with Ubuntu 23.10. Very much eager and looking forward to seeing Ubuntu 24.04 with the fresh Linux 6.8 to be released as stable in the next week or two.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has Mesa 24.0 graphics drivers, the GCC 13 stable series compiler, GNU Binutils 2.42, Glibc 2.39, and a wealth of other software updates to be found in this next Long Term Support release. Ubuntu 24.04's desktop installer has also seen some nice updates, improvements to the Thunderbird Snap, and more.

So with today's announcement, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is now officially in its feature freeze period. The Ubuntu 24.04 schedule has the UI freeze coming up on 21 March, the kernel feature freeze on 29 March, the hardware enablement freeze on 1 April, and the Ubuntu 24.04 beta on 4 April. If all goes well Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be officially released on 25 April.