Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) progress

Matthieu Clemenceau has publisheda status update from the Foundations Team on Ubuntu25.04 (Plucky Puffin) development to the UbuntuDiscourse forum. This includes updates on Ubuntu's adoptionof Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools, a move toa single ISO for arm64 devices rather than device-specific images, andreverting the planned O3 optimization flags for Plucky Puffin.

Earlier in this cycle, we announcedplans to enable the O3 optimization level for all Ubuntu packagesby default. As part of this effort, we conducted extensivebenchmarking, which revealed that while some workloads sawimprovements, overall system performance slightly declined, and binarysizes increased. Given these results, we are likely to revert thischange soon.

The beta for Ubuntu 25.04 is plannedfor March27, with the final release scheduled on April 17.