Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Won't Support JPEG-XL Out-Of-The-Box

There had been some hope that the Ubuntu 24.04 desktop would support the JPEG-XL image format out-of-the-box, but that isn't going to happen as a default change.

Canonical Desktop Software Engineer Jeremy Bicha wrote this week in a status update:

"I recognized that we won’t be able to get JPEG XL support into Ubuntu Desktop’s default install for 24.04 LTS, but there is still time to get the library updated in Universe so that the gdk-pixbuf support is available for install."

So users may be able to install the JPEG-XL support from the Ubuntu Universe archive but doesn't look like it will pass the bar to get it as part of the default Ubuntu desktop installation.

This follows the drama a year ago of Google dropping JPEG-XL from Chrome. JPEG-XL is a royalty-free graphics file format aiming to be a universal replacement to existing lossy and lossless compressed raster graphics formats. The file format and coding system have been standardized for about two years now.