Canonical starts offering Resolute Raccoon upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 users

Canonical announced on 30 September that users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be offered an automatic upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon. The offer appears through Update Manager and can also be started from the shell, ending a delay that stretched more than a month after the point release shipped.

Why the offer was late

A given LTS release normally starts offering the upgrade once the following LTS version gets its first point release. This time the offer slipped by more than a month: Ubuntu 26.04.1 arrived on 28 August 2026.

Canonical explained the slippage in a post to the ubuntu-announce mailing list. According to the company, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users would be offered the automatic upgrade to 26.04.1 LTS a couple of weeks after the release, once planned backports landed to address regressions in a recent version of rust-coreutils.

How to upgrade

There are two routes: the command line and the graphical interface. In both cases, install every outstanding update for the current version first, then reboot the machine.

Because Canonical uses phased updates, some packages may be held back temporarily. Running the same upgrade command again picks up whatever remains. If the upgrade is not offered automatically, run the Software Updater tool; from a shell, the equivalent is do-release-upgrade. The graphical tool reports that the software on the computer is up to date while noting that Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available.

On machines with a small partition it pays to clear the APT cache first. On The Register's test VM that single step freed 1 GB, which is often enough to stop an upgrade from stalling on disk space.

What Resolute Raccoon changes

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon shipped in April and drops Xorg: GNOME 50 runs Wayland only. Users of other desktops, from Cinnamon to Unity, still get X11. In The Register's testing, the new release drove older NVIDIA GPUs just fine on machines where 24.04 had struggled. The codename for 24.04 LTS is Noble Numbat.