Canonical has started pushing Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon, to existing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users. The upgrade offer comes more than a month after the point release first appeared, following a delay the company attributed to planned backports addressing regressions in a recent version of rust-coreutils. The delay was announced on the ubuntu-announce mailing list, and the fix work was tied to the ongoing Rust-for-C replacement effort that has drawn criticism from some prominent C advocates.
Users who want to upgrade can do so either through the Software Updater GUI or from the shell with the do-release-upgrade command. Before upgrading, Canonical recommends installing all outstanding updates, including snap refreshes, and running the full-upgrade command twice if any packages are held back due to phased updates. On systems with small partitions, clearing the APT cache with 'sudo apt clean' can free up a significant amount of space; in one test VM, it recovered roughly 1 GB.
The new release includes GNOME 50, which is now Wayland-only, and reportedly works well with older Nvidia GPUs that had issues on 24.04. Users of other desktops, such as Cinnamon or Unity, will continue to get X11. The upgrade path is now open to all 24.04 users, though Canonical is rolling it out in phases, so some may not see the offer immediately.