New Release of Ubuntu Desktop

New features in 24.04 LTS

Year 2038 support for the armhf architecture
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS solves the Year 2038 problem that existed on armhf. More than a thousand packages have been updated to handle time using a 64-bit value rather than a 32-bit one, making it possible to handle times up to 292 billion years in the future.

Updated Packages
Linux kernel:
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS includes the new 6.8 Linux kernel that brings many new features.

Detailed changes are reported in the Noble Kernel Release Notes post.

systemd v255.4
The init system was updated to systemd v255.4. See the upstream changelog 381 for more information about individual features.

Netplan v1.0:
The network stack was updated to Netplan version 1.0 . Supporting simultaneous WPA2 & WPA3, Mellanox VF-LAG for high-performance SR-IOV networking and VXLAN improvements. It also provides a stable libnetplan1 API and a new netplan status --diff sub-command to find differences between configuration and system state. For more information please see the Introducing Netplan v1.0 blog post.

Toolchain Upgrades:
GCC: is updated to the 14, binutils to 2.42, and glibc to 2.39.
Python: now defaults to version 3.12
OpenJDK: now defaults to LTS version 21
LLVM: now defaults to version 18
Rust: toolchain defaults to version 1.75
Golang: is updated to 1.22
.NET 8 is now default
OpenJDK
OpenJDK LTS 21 is the default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS while maintaining support for versions 17, 11, and 8. OpenJDK 17 and 21 are also TCK certified, which means they adhere to Java standards and ensure interoperability with other Java platforms. A special FIPS-compliant OpenJDK 11 package is also available for Ubuntu Pro users.

.NET
With the introduction of .NET 8, Ubuntu is taking a significant step forward in supporting the .NET community. .NET 8 will be fully supported on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 22.04 LTS for the entire lifecycle of both releases. This enables developers to upgrade their applications to newer .NET versions before upgrading their Ubuntu release. Starting with 24.04 LTS the .NET support has also been extended to the IBM System Z platform.

.NET 6 and .NET 7 packages with limited support are available via a PPA.

Apport
Apport added integration with systemd-coredump to handle crashes. Developers on Ubuntu can co-install systemd-coredump now and use coredumpctl to analyze crash data. Apport will continue to collect crash information and submit it to the Ubuntu Error Tracker and Launchpad.

Security Improvements ::
Unprivileged user namespace restrictions
In combination with the apparmor package, the Ubuntu kernel now restricts the use of unprivileged user namespaces. This affects all programs on the system that are unprivileged and unconfined. A default AppArmor profile is provided that allows the use of user namespaces for unprivileged and unconfined applications but will deny the subsequent use of any capabilities within the user namespace. A common use-case for unprivileged user namespaces is applications that construct their own sandboxes or work with styles of container workloads. As such, AppArmor profiles that allow the use of unprivileged user namespaces are also provided for common applications and frameworks that come from the Ubuntu archive, as well as popular third party applications like Google Chrome, Discord and others. This is a subsequent step towards trying to mitigate the larger attack surface presented by unprivileged user namespaces (the first being the introduction of this feature in Ubuntu 23.10 where it was not enabled by default).

Whilst significant effort has been expended to try and identify all applications that may require such profiles, it is expected that there may be cases where additional profiles are required.

Performance:
Performance Engineering tools
A set of performance engineering tools is installed by default on relevant Ubuntu systems. Additionally, a performance-tools metapackage has been created to assist in debugging performance and reliability issues.