Feeling plucky? Get testing!

You Can Now Download Daily Builds of Ubuntu 25.04

A sure-fire way to tell that development has moved up a gear: Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds are now available to download.

Development formally got underway on Ubuntu 25.04 ‘Plucky Puffin’ last month, with the final stable release of Ubuntu 25.04 arriving on Thursday April 17, 2025.

You’re probably wondering what sort of new features Ubuntu 25.04 may offer and the daily builds will get everyone ample chance to find out, first-hand, nice and early.

Only, there’s not much new to see — yet.

What’s Coming in Ubuntu 25.04?

There are plans to ship a new document viewer app in Ubuntu 25.04 – that’s not yet included. We know Linux 6.14 kernel – yes, 6.14 – is earmarked for inclusion, but Linux kernel 6.12 has only just been released, and work on 6.13 only beginning, so that’s not present.

And although GNOME 48 is already in development, the daily builds still carry GNOME 47 as, per tradition, Ubuntu development only joins the party around the time of the first GNOME beta.

Additionally, further features are in the mix for the desktop Security Center app as more snaps take advantage, and devs plan to add a ‘reinstall’ option and improve dual-boot configurations in Ubuntu’s Flutter-based OS installer.

But, again, none of that is present at the time I write this.

Yet beneath the surface there is a whopping great change as Ubuntu 25.04 now builds all packages with an aggressive compiler optimisation level “aimed at enhancing execution speed” – and benchmarks done so far, bear that out.

Perhaps Ubuntu 25.04 should’ve been named ‘Peppy Puffin’!

Who are Ubuntu Daily Builds for?

Ubuntu daily builds are pre-release installers generated from scratch each and every day – a ‘snapshot’ of progress. They’re designed to be used by developers, bug hunters, and app makers so they can try, test, and adapt to the latest changes in good time.

However, Ubuntu daily builds are not intended to be used on production systems (i.e., as your only OS) because they’re unstable, unfinished, and liable to receive package updates which (temporarily) ‘break’ core functionality.

Go in knowing the risks, and don’t be annoyed if your install gets borked and you need to reinstall – rare, but the potential for it to happen is there.

You can download a ‘current’ daily build — ‘current’ ISOs have passed a series of automated tests, while ‘pending’ ISOs have yet to be checked — and install updates as they’re released, effectively using it like a rolling release Linux distribution.

Download Ubuntu 25.04 Daily Build

You can download Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds from the Ubuntu cdimage website. They come as a standard ISO for 64-bit Intel/AMD or a generic 64-bit ARM¹ image.

Always use the latest ISO from the ‘current’ folder unless you specifically need to test/use something that is currently in the ‘pending’ ISO and you can’t wait.

As of November 19 the ‘current’ image folder has 24.10 ‘oracular’ ISOs and 25.04 ‘plucky’ ones. If downloading, be sure to select the correct ISO.

Flash the ISO to a USB to create bootable media you can then use to boot the release on laptop or PC and play around (you can, of course, choose to install it too – but bugs put any data on that device at risk).

Alternatively, and recommended, boot the ISO in the safety of a virtual machine and install it there.

1. Raspberry Pi daily build are up a level in the ‘daily-preinstalled’ folder, but there there are no images for 25.04 yet – if you spot ’em before I do, let me know! ↩︎