Ptyxis Becomes Ubuntu's Recommended Replacement To GNOME Terminal

While the Ubuntu desktop has been offered the newer GNOME Console as an alternative to GNOME Terminal, there's been a recent fondness around Ptyxis and apparently is becoming the recommended replacement to GNOME Terminal for the Ubuntu camp.

Ptyxis is the terminal emulator formerly known as GNOME Prompt and has an emphasis on performance and features while leveraging the VTE library. Ptyxis development is led by GNOME developer Christian Hergert.

Ptyxis began being offered on Ubuntu 24.10 but not by default. On current Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds GNOME Console is still there by default too, but there's an apparent growing fondness for Ptyxis.

Within this week's Desktop Team Integration Squad Updates, Canonical Desktop Software Engineer Jeremy Bicha's update reflected a number of Ptyxis-related work items and spelled things out clearly with:

"...for ptyxis, our recommended replacement for gnome-terminal."

Among the Ptyxis work by Ubuntu this past week is for ensuring new tabs are opened in the current working directory, opening an upstream bug report over Ptyxis screen reader issues, and supporting Ubuntu's purple background by default for Ptyxis in Ubuntu 24.10.

Ptyxis remains optionally available in Ubuntu 24.10 and I haven't seen any public indications yet of Ubuntu 25.04 aiming to replace GNOME Terminal with Ptyxis by default, but it's very intriguing to see it mentioned that Ptyxis is their "recommended replacement for gnome-terminal" by a core Ubuntu desktop developer and will be interesting to see what that equates to moving forward.