Canonical enabled the 24.04 LTS upgrade path on September 29. Two years of change in a single jump deserves more than a click-through — here is the operator's drill for reaching Resolute Raccoon safely.

On September 29 the Ubuntu Release Team announced that upgrades from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ("Noble Numbat") to Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS ("Resolute Raccoon") are now enabled. Desktop users on 24.04 will see the offer roll out progressively in Update Manager over the coming days; server users and the impatient can start immediately with do-release-upgrade. As always, the upgrade is free.

If you are wondering why the offer took a month and change — 26.04.1 itself shipped back on August 27 — the reason was flagged at the time: Canonical said the automatic offer would follow the point release once planned backports landed to address regressions found after launch. That work is now complete, the channel is live, and tens of millions of 24.04 systems are in the queue. If you run one of them, treat this as a maintenance window to plan, not a notification to click through between meetings.

What waits on the other side

This is a two-year jump, not a routine update. The headline items: the kernel moves from 6.8 to 7.0, and the desktop leaps from GNOME 46 to GNOME 50 — with Wayland now fully embraced as the default session, fractional scaling and variable refresh rate no longer experimental, and a rewritten default app suite: Papers for documents, Loupe for images, Ptyxis for the terminal, Resources for system monitoring, and Showtime for video. Support runs into 2031, with extended security maintenance available via Ubuntu Pro into 2036. Canonical also notes improved NVIDIA support under Wayland and a unified App Center that shows debs and snaps side by side.

None of that should be a surprise on upgrade day. Which brings us to the drill.

The playbook

1. Bring 24.04 fully up to date first. Run sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade, then sudo snap refresh. Because Canonical uses phased updates, some packages may show as held back — run the upgrade command again until everything lands. The release upgrader expects a fully updated system, and starting from a half-updated one is how you get a half-migrated package set.

2. Back up before you touch anything. At minimum: your home directory, anything under /etc you have customized, and a snapshot of your installed packages (dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt gives you a manifest to compare against later). If this machine matters, take a full disk image or filesystem snapshot. A distribution upgrade touches thousands of packages; you want a way back.

3. Read the release notes. The 26.04 release notes document known issues, workarounds, and behavioral changes. Ten minutes here is cheaper than discovering after the reboot that a workflow you depend on changed upstream.

4. Audit third-party sources. PPAs and external repositories get disabled during the upgrade. Note which ones you rely on, check whether each has a 26.04 ("resolute") build, and plan to re-enable them one at a time afterward — never all at once, so a single broken source can't hold your package database hostage.

5. Pick your upgrade path. Desktop users can wait for the Update Manager prompt, which Canonical is rolling out progressively. Server users, or anyone who doesn't want to wait, can run do-release-upgrade from a terminal. If you're upgrading over SSH, do it inside tmux or screen — a dropped connection mid-upgrade is one of the classic ways to brick a box.

6. Answer the config prompts like you mean it. The upgrader will ask whether to keep or replace configuration files you have modified. If you customized a file, keep yours and merge the new defaults in afterward; blindly accepting replacements is how tuned services come back up with stock settings.

7. Verify after the reboot. Confirm the release (lsb_release -a), check the kernel (uname -r), walk through your critical services, clean up with sudo apt autoremove, and re-enable those PPAs one by one.

The two-year LTS jump is the whole point of choosing an LTS in the first place — stability now, one big planned migration later. Planned is the operative word. Run the drill, and Resolute Raccoon is a calm afternoon. Skip it, and it's a 2 AM incident with a package manager.

Sources: Ubuntu Release Team announcement, Sept 29 2026 · Canonical: Upgrade your desktop · Ubuntu 26.04 release notes