Canonical announced that Ubuntu 24.10 will be the first release to ship with the latest upstream kernel.

That means "Oracular Oriole" will come with Linux kernel version 6.11. Previously, Ubuntu shipped with kernels that would soon reach EOL, which was driven by Canonical's need to always ship what they knew would work and had been sufficiently tested, vetted, and updated.

According to Brett Grandbois (Ubuntu Kernel Engineering Director), the old policy was a conservative "wait and see" approach, which guaranteed stability on the appointed release day but proved unpopular with consumers looking for the latest features and hardware support.

Under the new policy, Grandbois states, "Ubuntu will now ship the absolute latest available version of the upstream Linux kernel at the specified Ubuntu release freeze date, even if upstream is still in Release Candidate (RC) status."

This will, of course, bring about a few complications, such as kernel variants, dependent components, a tighter release, possible unstable releases, and late releases.

Grandbois said that any upstream kernel that has a merge window opened after feature freeze would be considered too unstable and its release too far in the future to be adopted for a pending release.

You can read more about this new policy in Grandbois's blog post (linked above), which goes into further detail about the issues and guidelines.