Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs Every Major Ubuntu Version: What Actually Changed

Why This Comparison Matters Right Now

As of May 31, 2025, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) reached the end of its standard five-year support window, leaving organizations that had not yet migrated without free security updates from Canonical. That cutoff date transformed the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS upgrade decision from something IT teams could defer to something they had to act on. At the same time, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) is fully supported until April 2027, meaning administrators running production workloads on Jammy are not being forced to move yet — but the case for Noble Numbat is increasingly compelling on technical grounds alone.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, codenamed Noble Numbat, was released on April 25, 2024. It is Canonical's 10th long-term support release and, by most measurable criteria, its most technically ambitious. The release builds on three consecutive interim releases — 22.10, 23.04, and 23.10 — that each contributed incremental changes to the installer, the security model, and the desktop. Noble Numbat collects all of that work, stabilizes it, and commits to maintaining it for up to 12 years with Ubuntu Pro's Legacy Support add-on.

At the Noble Numbat launch, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth described the release as a step into performance engineering and confidential computing, positioned as an enterprise-grade innovation platform with at least 12 years of support. — Canonical press release, April 25, 2024

This article compares Ubuntu 24.04 LTS against its LTS predecessors — primarily 22.04 and 20.04 — across every meaningful dimension: kernel, desktop, security architecture, developer toolchain, server stack, and support lifecycle. Readers managing fleets, building courses, or making upgrade decisions will find verifiable, source-linked specifics rather than marketing summaries.

Support Lifecycles at a Glance

Before examining technical differences, the support timeline is the single most consequential factor for administrators choosing which Ubuntu version to deploy on long-lived infrastructure. The following table reflects confirmed Canonical lifecycle data as of March 2026.

The 12-year commitment to 24.04 LTS via the Legacy Support add-on is not purely a marketing figure. It applies retroactively to earlier LTS releases starting from 14.04, per Canonical's November 2025 announcement extending Legacy support to 15 years. For organizations with multi-year hardware procurement cycles, this matters significantly more than any single feature improvement.

The Kernel Leap: 5.15 to 6.8

The Linux kernel is the most technically impactful variable separating Ubuntu LTS releases. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipped with kernel 5.15, which was appropriate for hardware available in early 2022. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ships with kernel 6.8, skipping three major version milestones and collecting improvements that compound meaningfully in real-world workloads.

What kernel 6.8 adds over 5.15

The most operationally significant improvement in kernel 6.8 is the matured Multi-Generation LRU (MGLRU) page reclamation algorithm. Under memory pressure — a common scenario on containerized VPS environments or heavily loaded database servers — MGLRU makes smarter decisions about which pages to evict from RAM, reducing swap thrashing and improving application responsiveness. Benchmarks published by hosting providers have shown MGLRU reducing memory-pressure-induced latency spikes by 30 to 50 percent compared to the classic LRU algorithm in kernel 5.15.

Improved io_uring performance in 6.8 means faster asynchronous I/O, directly benefiting database servers and applications with heavy disk operations. PostgreSQL and MySQL both show measurable gains on io_uring-aware workloads when compared side-by-side on 5.15 versus 6.8. Better cgroup v2 support means more accurate memory accounting, fairer CPU scheduling across containers, and more granular I/O throttling — all of which translate to better isolation and resource control in Docker and Kubernetes deployments.

On the hardware side, kernel 6.8 includes the Intel GPU Xe driver, an improved task scheduler, and support for the bcachefs filesystem. The 2038 problem has been patched for 32-bit armhf systems. Raspberry Pi users running 24.04 no longer need a separate package for Bluetooth support, a small quality-of-life improvement that eliminates a common installation pitfall.

For most web and application server workloads, the kernel upgrade from 5.15 to 6.8 translates to 5 to 15 percent better performance under contention scenarios — high CPU load, memory pressure, heavy I/O. Under normal operation with available headroom, the difference is less visible but still present. This is not a dramatic performance revolution; it is accumulated refinement across two years of upstream kernel development.

Desktop: GNOME 42 to GNOME 46

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipped GNOME 42. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ships GNOME 46, skipping two complete releases of the upstream desktop environment. This is a significant jump. GNOME 44 and 45 each contributed visible changes to settings, notifications, and application design; 46 consolidates all of them into the first LTS where the modern libadwaita and GTK4 design language is the default across many core apps.

Window tiling

Ubuntu 22.04 supported snapping windows to the left, right, top, or bottom of the screen. Ubuntu 24.04 introduces the Ubuntu Tiling Assistant, enabling quarter-tiling — windows can now snap to any quadrant of the screen. This brings Ubuntu's built-in window management meaningfully closer to what users expect from tiling-focused environments without requiring a third-party extension.

App Center and Firmware Updater

Ubuntu 24.04 replaces the Snap Store with a completely redesigned App Center built from the ground up using the Flutter toolkit. The new center includes a dedicated Games page and delivers a more responsive browsing experience. Separately, firmware updates are now handled by a dedicated Firmware Updater application rather than being routed through the software center — a logical separation that eliminates the friction caused by the fact that firmware cannot be delivered as snap packages.

PipeWire as the default audio server

PipeWire was present in Ubuntu 22.04, but in 22.04 it only managed video streams. In Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, PipeWire v1.0.4 is promoted to handle all audio and video, replacing PulseAudio as the default sound server. For most users this transition is invisible, but for professionals working with low-latency audio, screen capture, or virtual audio routing, it removes a category of configuration complexity that previously required third-party tools.

Installation experience

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS brings the Subiquity installer to a desktop LTS for the first time. The installer supports a new "minimal install by default" option, experimental ZFS with TPM-based full disk encryption, and the ability to import autoinstall configurations. The previous Ubuntu installer (ubiquity) had been the default since Ubuntu 6.10; Subiquity's arrival on the desktop marks a substantial architectural shift toward a unified installer codebase across desktop and server.

Security Architecture: The Biggest Generational Leap

Security is where the gap between Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and its predecessors is most pronounced. The changes are not cosmetic; they represent deliberate decisions to raise the default security floor in ways that affect everything from kernel access control to cryptographic policy.

AppArmor 4 and user namespace restrictions

Ubuntu 24.04 ships AppArmor 4, which introduces more granular policy controls and a fundamentally new capability: the ability to mediate access to user namespaces and the io_uring subsystem from within the kernel. Both of these interfaces have historically provided attack surfaces to malicious applications attempting privilege escalation. AppArmor 4's kernel-level restrictions on unprivileged user namespaces reduce the attack surface for container escape vulnerabilities — a meaningful hardening for any server running Docker containers, given that unprivileged user namespaces have been implicated in several high-profile container escape CVEs over the preceding years.

The experimental snapd prompting feature, backed by this new AppArmor capability, allows users to exercise direct control over which files a snap application can access within their home directory — a level of granularity that earlier Ubuntu versions could not offer without custom profiles.

Confidential computing

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS represents Canonical's first production-grade commitment to confidential computing across public cloud providers. The release supports AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX — hardware features that allow virtual machines to run with memory encryption and integrity protection that is inaccessible to the hypervisor and, by extension, to the infrastructure operator. Ubuntu now offers the widest portfolio of confidential VM images across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon AWS for any Linux distribution.

Jeremy Winter, Corporate Vice President of Azure Cloud Native at Microsoft, cited the release as delivering meaningful performance, developer productivity, and security improvements for joint Canonical and Microsoft customers. — Canonical, Noble Numbat release announcement, April 25, 2024

This capability did not exist in Ubuntu 22.04 at launch and was only partially available through backports. For organizations operating regulated workloads in multi-tenant cloud environments, this is a genuinely new capability rather than an incremental improvement.

TPM 2.0 full disk encryption

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS adds full support for Trusted Platform Module 2.0, enabling hardware-backed disk encryption key protection, secure boot attestation, and the ability to tie disk encryption cryptographically to the hardware it is running on. A TPM2 Storage Root Key is now set up at boot via the systemd-tpm2-setup service if one is not already present. This means users running Noble Numbat on modern hardware no longer need to enter a decryption password on every boot to maintain full disk encryption — the TPM handles key attestation automatically.

TLS deprecations and SSH hardening

Ubuntu 24.04 enforces TLS 1.2 as the minimum system-wide, with TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 disabled by default. SSH default configuration is also stricter, with weaker key exchange algorithms and legacy ciphers removed from the default server configuration. Sudo 1.9.15 introduces the use_pty option set by default, protecting against privilege escalation and command injection. These changes are not visible to everyday users but represent a meaningful shift in baseline cryptographic hygiene for any server deployed from a fresh 24.04 image.

Binary hardening

Ubuntu 24.04 introduces FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 as the default binary hardening level, up from level 2 in previous releases. This compile-time security feature catches a broader class of buffer overflow conditions in standard library calls and is a background improvement that every package in the repository inherits without developer action.

Ubuntu LTS releases anchor developer toolchains for years. The differences between the toolchain shipped with 22.04 and 24.04 are consequential for anyone building software that will be compiled, tested, or shipped on Ubuntu.

The .NET 8 inclusion deserves particular attention. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS marks the first time Canonical has committed to shipping a .NET LTS release and maintaining it for the entire lifecycle of the OS version. Microsoft and Canonical have an engineering relationship spanning update infrastructure and developer tooling; Jeremy Winter of Microsoft specifically cited .NET 8 as a focal point of that collaboration in the Noble Numbat release announcement.

For Java developers, OpenJDK 21 is the default in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with TCK certification confirming Java interoperability standards compliance — a requirement for enterprises deploying certified Java applications. OpenJDK 17 and 11 remain available. The Rust toolchain gains a simpler snap framework that will allow future Rust versions to be delivered to developers on 24.04 in the years ahead without waiting for a new OS release.

The Snap Question: What Changed, What Stayed, What It Means for You

No honest comparison of Ubuntu versions can skip this. The relationship between Snap, APT, and users has been the most contentious topic in Ubuntu for the better part of four years — and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS does not resolve it so much as clarify where Canonical stands.

In 24.04, the Firefox browser ships exclusively as a Snap. The Chromium browser name in APT is a transitional stub that silently bootstraps snapd and installs the Snap version instead of a native .deb. A user who types sudo apt install chromium-browser and expects the same behavior they have observed since Ubuntu 16.04 gets something different — the Snap runtime activates in the background with no explicit prompt, and the installed binary lives under /snap/ rather than the familiar /usr/bin/ path. This silent format-switching is the specific behavior that Linux Mint's team cited when they blocked snapd from being installable via APT in Mint 20 and later.

The practical complaints around Snap center on two things: cold-start latency and the proprietary backend. On a default Ubuntu 24.04 install, Firefox's first launch from a cold system can take significantly longer than an equivalent native .deb install of the same browser. Subsequent launches improve once the Snap is cached in memory. The Snap Store backend is operated exclusively by Canonical and, unlike Flatpak's Flathub, cannot be mirrored or replaced — a point that matters to organizations operating air-gapped or partially-isolated environments.

For server administrators who work exclusively with APT packages from the Ubuntu archive and PPAs, the Snap situation is largely invisible. snapd is not installed by default on the Ubuntu Server image, only on the Desktop image, and there is no technical barrier to removing it from a desktop install if your workflow does not depend on any Snap-packaged applications. The APT package manager, .deb packaging, and the full Debian-derived software archive are unchanged and fully intact in 24.04 LTS.

Compared to Ubuntu 22.04, the 24.04 position on Snap is more pronounced, not less. If you are evaluating Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for a desktop fleet where browser management is handled through your own deployment pipeline, plan for Firefox and Chromium by name to behave differently than they did under 22.04, and configure your preferred installation path before rollout rather than relying on the transitional APT stubs.

Server Stack Updates

On the server side, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ships with a comprehensively refreshed package set. The version bumps are not arbitrary; they track upstream LTS and stable releases at the time of the Noble Numbat freeze. For a complete look at managing these components in production, see the guide to Ubuntu server management in 2026.

Notable server package versions in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS include: Apache 2.4.58, Nginx 1.24, MariaDB 10.11, PostgreSQL 16.2, Docker 24.0.7 (via docker.io), containerd 1.7.12, QEMU 8.2, libvirt 10.0, HAProxy 2.8.5, and OpenLDAP 2.6.7. LXD is no longer pre-installed by default in the server variant, reducing the initial footprint; it installs on first use when needed. The Landscape web portal is rebuilt with Canonical's Vanilla Framework, adding an improved API and a new repository snapshot service.

systemd advances from version 249 in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to version 255.4 in 24.04 LTS. This update brings faster boot performance, smoother service management, and — relevant to the security section above — tighter integration with TPM 2.0 through the systemd-tpm2-setup service. Netplan 1.0, released in parallel with Ubuntu 24.04, is the default network configuration tool and receives its first stable major version with Noble Numbat.

Interim Releases: 22.10, 23.04, and 23.10

Understanding the LTS-to-LTS gap requires knowing what the three interim releases between 22.04 and 24.04 contributed. Interim releases carry nine months of support and are not intended for production servers, but they serve as the development runway for each LTS.

Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu, October 2022) introduced PipeWire as the audio default and began the migration toward newer GNOME releases. Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster, April 2023) introduced the new Ubuntu App Center in beta and advanced the Subiquity installer toward desktop readiness. Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur, October 2023) previewed hardware-backed TPM disk encryption in the installer, enabled unprivileged user namespace restrictions backed by AppArmor, and shipped the Games page in the App Center.

Noble Numbat is the point where all three of these staged introductions graduate from preview to production. Users who tested 23.10 will find 24.04 familiar; users upgrading directly from 22.04 will encounter them all at once.

The 20.04 Situation: What Running EOL Actually Means

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS shipped in April 2020 with kernel 5.4, GNOME 3.36, Python 3.8, and OpenJDK 11. Its standard support ended May 31, 2025. Systems still running Focal Fossa without Ubuntu Pro are no longer receiving security updates from Canonical. This is not a theoretical concern: CVEs disclosed after May 2025 against packages in the Ubuntu 20.04 archive go unpatched on those systems unless organizations subscribe to Ubuntu Pro Extended Security Maintenance, which extends coverage to May 2030, or the Legacy add-on extending it to May 2032.

The practical security gap between 20.04 and 24.04 is not just the two kernel generations and the missing AppArmor 4 protections. It is the accumulation of every CVE fix, TLS policy change, and binary hardening improvement across four years of Ubuntu development. Running 20.04 in 2026 without ESM is a compliance liability in regulated industries including healthcare (HIPAA), payments (PCI DSS), and data privacy (GDPR).

For organizations that cannot upgrade immediately, Ubuntu Pro is free for personal and small-scale commercial use on up to five machines. Paid plans with per-machine pricing are available for larger fleets. The upgrade path from 20.04 to 24.04 is sequential: upgrade to 22.04 first, verify stability, then upgrade to 24.04.

What Stayed the Same

Comparisons of this kind tend to emphasize change, but continuity matters too. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS remains Debian-based, with the same APT package management, the same systemd service model, and the same fundamental system architecture that has made Ubuntu familiar and predictable since its first release in 2004. The 24.04 installer supports the same upgrade-in-place path from 22.04, preserving configurations and installed packages. Software that ran on 22.04 overwhelmingly runs on 24.04 without modification.

The official flavors — Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, and Edubuntu — all released their 24.04 LTS versions on April 25, 2024, alongside the main release. For administrators who manage flavor-based deployments, the upgrade path and support timeline are identical to the main Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Should You Upgrade to 24.04 LTS?

The answer depends on your specific situation, but the general direction is clear. Work through the decision engine below to get a recommendation calibrated to your context.

The use cases where staying on 22.04 may be rational: production systems with extensive testing investment in the 22.04 stack, where the cost of re-validation outweighs the technical benefits before the 2027 end-of-life date; and mixed-OS environments where third-party software has not yet been certified for 24.04.

Upgrade gotchas worth knowing before you start

The in-place upgrade path from 22.04 to 24.04 works well under controlled conditions, but several failure modes are reproducible enough to plan around before you begin. Third-party PPAs are the most common source of upgrade stalls: do-release-upgrade disables all PPAs before proceeding, but packages installed from those PPAs that have no equivalent in the 24.04 archive will be flagged for removal. If those packages are dependencies of production services, the upgrade will halt and require manual resolution. Audit your PPA-sourced packages before upgrading and identify replacements from the main archive where possible.

The Snap transitions are a second category of friction on in-place upgrades. If Firefox is installed as a native .deb on 22.04 via a custom PPA, the upgrade process will not automatically convert it to the Snap version — but the transitional stub in 24.04's APT archive will take ownership of the package name, which can produce unexpected behavior on subsequent apt upgrade runs after the OS upgrade completes. Pin your preferred Firefox source explicitly if you are managing browser installs outside the default configuration.

Finally, custom AppArmor profiles written for 22.04 may need revision on 24.04. AppArmor 4's namespace mediation introduces new profile syntax capabilities, and the kernel-level enforcement of unprivileged user namespace restrictions can affect containerized applications or older software that relied on unrestricted namespace creation. Test AppArmor profiles in a non-production environment before rolling 24.04 upgrades to systems where custom profiles are in use.

$ apt list --manual-installed 2>/dev/null | grep -v "Listing..."

Should you wait for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS instead?

As of this writing in March 2026, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon is scheduled for release on April 23, 2026 — five weeks away. This is a genuinely relevant question for anyone who has not yet committed to a 24.04 deployment, and the honest answer is: it depends on the use case, but for servers the calculus favors starting with 24.04 now rather than waiting.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will ship Linux kernel 7.0, GNOME 50 running exclusively on Wayland (with XWayland retained for legacy X11 applications), further hardened TPM-backed disk encryption, and Snap permission prompting enabled by default rather than as an experimental feature. It will also include optional x86-64-v3 packages for systems on newer processors, and ROCm support for AMD GPU compute workloads available directly from the Ubuntu archive. For desktop users, the Wayland-only GNOME session and the shift of additional core utilities to Rust-based rewrites will be the most visible changes.

For new production server deployments in the window between now and April 23, the case for waiting is thin. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be directly upgradeable to 26.04 LTS after the first point release — Ubuntu 26.04.1 — which Canonical has scheduled for August 6, 2026. Starting a deployment on 24.04 today and upgrading in August is a reasonable path. For desktop users who primarily care about GNOME changes or Wayland stability, waiting five weeks for 26.04 is sensible. For teams migrating from 20.04 who need to act on the compliance exposure described earlier in this article, waiting is not the right call — get to 24.04 now and plan the 26.04 evaluation for later in 2026.

Conclusion

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat is not a marginal increment on 22.04. It carries Linux kernel 6.8, AppArmor 4, full TPM 2.0 integration, confidential computing support, GNOME 46, PipeWire for audio, a rebuilt installer, a new App Center, and a refreshed server and developer toolchain. Viewed against Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the gap is generational. Viewed against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, it is substantial enough to justify upgrade planning in the near term for most production environments.

The 12-year support commitment via Ubuntu Pro Legacy Support makes 24.04 LTS the most defensible choice for long-lived infrastructure deployments. For organizations already managing Ubuntu at scale, the question is no longer whether to move to Noble Numbat but when.