Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS has been released. Canonical says upgrades from 24.04 LTS will be enabled in a few weeks.

That second sentence is the story. The .1 release is the one that actually matters for the large installed base still on 24.04.

Why .1 is the real release

Canonical does not enable LTS-to-LTS upgrade prompts when a new LTS ships. It enables them after the first point release, roughly three to four months later.

The reasoning is sound. A .0 LTS is a new release with new bugs, and Canonical would rather find them with early adopters who chose to install it than with conservative users who upgraded because a dialog suggested it. The .1 release rolls in several months of fixes, an updated hardware enablement stack, and refreshed installation media that does not require downloading hundreds of updates immediately after install.

If you have been waiting on 24.04 for the upgrade to feel safe, this release plus the few weeks until prompts are enabled is the answer to that.

What is in it

Point releases are not feature releases. 26.04.1 contains accumulated bug fixes and security updates, refreshed ISOs, and updated hardware support. Nothing changes about how the system works.

Anyone already running 26.04 and keeping up with updates is effectively on 26.04.1 already. The point release exists mainly so new installations start from a current base.

Upgrading from 24.04

When prompts arrive, the process is the standard one:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade

Before starting, the things worth doing:

Back up properly. Our backup guide covers this. An LTS-to-LTS upgrade is two years of package changes at once, and a rollback path turns a bad outcome into an inconvenience.

Check your PPAs. Third-party repositories are the most common cause of upgrade trouble. do-release-upgrade disables them, but packages already installed from them can conflict with the new base.

Note that 24.04 is not urgent. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS receives standard support until 2029, so there is no security pressure to move. The reason to upgrade is newer packages, not safety.

Also this week

Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS has also been released, with an updated hardware enablement stack based on Linux 7.0 and refreshed media. That is the release for anyone staying on 24.04, and it brings newer kernel and graphics support to hardware that shipped after 24.04 did.

Between the two, 24.04 users have a straightforward choice: take 24.04.5 and stay put until 2029, or wait a few weeks and move to 26.04. Both are defensible, and the newer-hardware argument is the one that usually decides it.