The early bird gets a touch of nostalgia as Ubuntu 24.10 hits beta

Fun retro tweaks, App Center facelift, and more as Oracular Oriole moves into view

The beta version of Ubuntu 24.10 has just come out, with GNOME 47 as its default desktop and some fun retro touches.

It's an interim release that will only get updates until next August, so it's mainly for enthusiasts; if you go for it, you're committing to the next couple of interim releases. After Oracular, you will need to upgrade to 25.04 and then 25.10 before the next LTS, 26.04 in April 2026.

We gave the beta a quick spin in VirtualBox. We gave it 4 GB of RAM, 25 GB of disk, and two CPU cores, in which it performed well – although it's a good idea to bump the VM's VRAM to 128 MB. If you have a decade-or-so-old PC lying around, it won't run Windows 11. As the end of Windows 10's life approaches, Oracular could be a good option for a test run.

Earlier this year, Canonical's Oliver Smith talked about the roadmap on the company's Discourse. As a discreet message above the logo on the login screen proclaims, version 24.10 is the 20th anniversary release of Ubuntu. And as we mentioned last month, there are a few callbacks to Ubuntu's early days, such as touches of brown and the return of an older startup noise – although, at least in the beta, not the original tribal drums.

This version defaults to using Wayland, even on computers with a recent Nvidia card. For testing, we switched to traditional X.org, as that works better in a VirtualBox VM.

Canonical's snap-centric App Center has had a facelift. It can now handle traditional Debian packages as well as snaps, and offers the choice when searching or installing. If you download a .deb package then double-click it, by default the App Center opens to handle it.

Ubuntu transforms GNOME's standard "dash" into a fixed dock, by default on the left edge of the screen. For us, this is a welcome change, although some might disagree. Ubuntu's dock now has refined context menus, which have a title across the top in smaller text – in case you're in the habit of right-clicking on the wrong thing, presumably.

In this version, the Dock also gains improved handling of snap-packaged apps. If you right-click on a snap app, such as Firefox, there's a new final context-menu entry, "App Details." This opens the App Center and shows that app's information, such as size, version, confinement type, and so on. The dock also shows progress bars on the icons of snap apps as they're updating, which we suspect may prove reassuring.

Incidentally, although the OS automatically updates snaps in the background, you can always kick this off manually. The Reg FOSS desk usually updates from the command line, like so:

sudo -s
apt update
apt full-upgrade -y

To do snaps at the same time, just add a line:

snap refresh

To combine all these into one line:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y && sudo snap refresh

This gets all the updates out of the way at the start of your day, so you can be confident you won't be bothered again.

This release gets a newer version of the venerable apt command, with more colorful, columnar output, which is much more readable and reduces the need for replacement packaging tools such as Nala.

Inside the GNOME Settings app, many of Ubuntu's changes have been consolidated into a single place, under the heading of "Ubuntu Desktop." Here, you can adjust the settings for desktop icons, the dock, and the window-tiling assistant.

Canonical is still working on some significant changes to its installation program, but in this version it looks much the same as before. Raspberry Pi users get a sneak peek of one future feature. You don't normally install an OS onto a Pi, you simply write a pre-installed image to SD card. In Oracular, Pi folks will get a first-run setup wizard based on the GNOME tool. Something like this will come to the desktop edition in the future.

As a welcome sign of Canonical's new kernel versions policy, the Oracular beta uses kernel 6.11.0. At the time of writing, this is only about 10 days old: Linus Torvalds released it while he was in Vienna for the Open Source Summit. LWN has a two-part in-depth look at the new features. Although most of the changes shouldn't be particularly conspicuous in a desktop or laptop computer, with luck, users will see better power management, especially on AMD-based systems. There's also better disk performance on ext4 disks, still Ubuntu's default file system, and newer Nvidia drivers, along with the usual array of subsystem improvements.

The release of Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" is expected on October 10. When it arrives next month, it's worth a look. Ubuntu is a mature and pretty solid OS these days, so while corporates and production systems should definitely stay with the LTS, it's perfectly reasonable for home users to run the interim versions. They are not unfinished test products or anything, and running them can at least eliminate some nagging about Ubuntu Pro.

Of course, when the primary GNOME version appears, so will all the remixes. If you normally run one of the other flavors, it's worth upgrading even more. Only the GNOME edition gets the full five years of support. The other desktops in the various other remixes will start to get dated, so we recommend tracking interim releases if you prefer to use Xfce, Unity, or any of the other alternative editions. ®