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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Ubuntu 26.04 might be the fastest release yet.
• With a new kernel and GNOME 50, this raccoon can run.
• This is also the first Wayland-only release.

Ubuntu 26.04, aka Resolute Raccoon, is just a few days away -- April 23 -- and it's received a decent performance boost over version 25.10, according to Phoronix benchmarks.

You can view the graphs and quickly see that 26.04 outperforms 25.10 across nearly every category, including PyPerformance, the Godot Game Engine, Kernel Compilation, and more. In fact, I didn't see a single test where 26.04 lost to 25.10.

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Faster is always the goal, even though it's not always the reality. his time around it is. I took the latest beta out for a spin, and the performance gains are quite noticeable. Applications installed and opened faster than I've seen on any Ubuntu release in some time.

Where do these gains come from? Two places:

• Kernel 7
• GNOME 50

Let me paint this in a way that could appeal to a large community of users.

Good news for gamers

Gaming.

With Ubuntu 26.04 showing significant improvements over 25.10 and the latest release of Wine 11 (which delivers serious performance gains for Windows games on Linux), it's easy to see why this is important. Even better, those performance gains don't leave out AMD hardware. That could finally level the playing field for Intel and AMD.

But let's get back to gaming. 

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A large swatch of gamers have been looking for a reason to jump off the Windows ship and into the warm embrace of Linux waters. This Ubuntu release gives that community one more piece of the puzzle they've been waiting for. (The final puzzle piece is all about the good old anti-cheat issue.)

If you're a gamer and install Wine 11 on Ubuntu 26.04, you should see a significant improvement over the Ubuntu 25.10/Wine 10 combination. Speaking of combinations, there's also the latest version of Mesa. Version 26 of this piece of the video stack brings significant OpenGL/Vulkan performance gains for both AMD/Intell GPUs.

So you have kernel 7.0, Wine 11, and Mesa 26 coming together to deliver noticeable performance improvements. 

The improvements aren't limited to performance. There are new icons, new default apps (such as the new video player, Showtime), a new system monitor (Resources), and more. As well, the Software & Updates app is gone, and the functionality is now spread across the App Center and a new Security Center. But all of the new additions/changes take a back seat to the performance gains.

One change and a surprise addition (by subtraction)

In addition to the major performance improvements, 26.04 brings one big addition by way of a subtraction: the Wayland-only GNOME desktop. That's right, X11 is no longer an option in the GDM login manager -- you'll only find Wayland.

The standalone Software & Updates application has been removed. Its functionality is now split between the App Center (for package management) and the new Security Center (for repository settings and Ubuntu Pro features).

Also, Canonical has raised the minimum required RAM amount from 4GB to 6GB. Given that most modern PCs rarely ship with only 4GB of RAM these days, that shouldn't be an issue. On older machines -- maybe.

I love this new Ubuntu

After testing Ubuntu 26.04 for a while, I fell in love with the changes, and especially the speed. This is the best performing version of Ubuntu I've ever used, and the replacement apps are an improvement over their predecessors. 

All of this comes together to create a version of Ubuntu that is improved from every possible aspect.

Although you could download and install the latest beta release, I recommend holding off until the general release is available. As soon as you install Ubuntu 26.04, you'll be wowed by the performance, whether you're a gamer or not.