Summary
- Canonical has introduced monthly “snapshot” Ubuntu releases for better testing of major point releases in development.
- The snapshots are not a switch to rolling release for Ubuntu, but a way to test new changes sooner and more efficiently.
- Snapshot 1 for Ubuntu 25.10 is already available on Ubuntu’s website for testing.
Canonical, the company that develops the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is adding to its release schedule by dropping “snapshots” for upcoming Ubuntu releases every month. It’s the first significant change to Ubuntu’s release cycle in many years, and the goal is to improve testing.
Since the mid-2000s, Ubuntu has been dedicated to a strict (by Linux standards) release cycle, holding public releases until April and October of every year. Ubuntu 24.10 came out in October of last year, and we saw the release of Ubuntu 25.04 in April, for example. Snapshots are introducing smaller, progressive releases in the intervening months, and before beta releases.
You might be thinking this sounds like a switch to a rolling release cycle or a monthly point release. It’s neither of those things, though. Instead, Canonical is bringing forward the latest software updates with snapshots for testing purposes only. As Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical, wrote,
… software engineering has evolved as a practice, and the advent of both rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux, and more recently image-based immutable distributions such as Universal Blue have meant that other projects with similar goals have adopted vastly different release models with some desirable properties.
I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of the shifts in development approaches Seager discussed, but essentially Canonical wants the quality testing benefits of frequent, public releases while still maintaining a six-month cadence for the stable releases that you and I would use. That means that while you’ll see announcements for Ubuntu snapshots, they won’t impact you unless you’re interested in participating in testing. Canonical calls this “supercharging” its release schedule, implying the change is more of an increase in releases than an overturning or erasure of the normal releases you’re used to.
That means that you shouldn’t expect there to be changes to Ubuntu version numbers, either. While there is a snapshot release already available for May, it isn’t called “Ubuntu 25.05”. Instead, it’s called Ubuntu 25.10 Snapshot 1.
As you may know, Canonical devs are already putting together Ubuntu 25.10, nicknamed “Questing Quokka.” It’s the first to get snapshot releases while we wait for the beta in September and the full release in October. Canonical gave us the following schedule for all of those releases:
- May 29, 2025: Questing Quokka – Snapshot 1
- June 10, 2025: Questing Quokka – Snapshot 2
- July 15, 2025: Questing Quokka – Snapshot 3
- August 19, 2025: Questing Quokka – Snapshot 4
- September 18, 2025: Questing Quokka – Beta
- October 9, 2025: Questing Quokka – Final Release
You can get that first snapshot for May by going to the Questing Quokka Snapshot 1 release page and finding the ISO for your device.
For the Ubuntu folks reading this, you’re going to want to grab that snapshot only if you want to participate in testing and reporting bugs and other issues. Snapshots aren’t meant for daily driving, so, otherwise, you should stick to the major point releases. If you do decide to download it, you’ll want to install it as a virtual machine or maybe on an old device you don’t rely on.
If you’re like me and use an Ubuntu derivative like Kubuntu, I wouldn’t expect to see snapshot releases for our distributions, at least not any time soon. This release process is the Canonical team’s new project, and developers of Ubuntu’s various flavors and other downstream distributions I think will continue focusing on point releases for now.
Source: omg! ubuntu