Ubuntu 26.04 Beta Arrives with Some Surprises
Ubuntu 26.04 is almost here, but the beta version has been released, and it might surprise some people.
If you're anxiously awaiting the release of the next Ubuntu desktop iteration, there's reason for you to be excited. Actually, there are a few reasons.
First and foremost, Phoronix has reported that Ubuntu 26.04 shows marked performance improvement over the previous version. Although some of the benchmarks show both releases are fairly equal, there are some, such as the Unvanquished 0.55.0 test, that revealed considerable gains. On that front, Michael Larabel (the author of the post) stated, "In a few graphics/gaming benchmarks, there were performance benefits to using Ubuntu 26.04, potentially due to the Linux 7.0 kernel improvements and/or the updated GNOME 50 desktop with the latest Mutter Wayland compositor having enhancements."
So there it is, gamers should rejoice because the gaming experience in Ubuntu 26.04 will be an improvement over previous iterations. And when you combine that with the latest Wine release, things start to get serious for gamers.
Yes, Ubuntu 26.04 will ship with kernel 7, as well as GNOME 50, so there should be performance and reliability improvements all around.
There's another surprise coming in Ubuntu 26.04, one that might upset some users. The developers have decided to remove Google Drive support from the desktop. On this thread in the GNOME Discourse server, a release team member stated, "As written before, Libgdata has been unmaintained for years. It pulled in ancient dependencies into the software stack (libsoup2), blocking improvements in other parts of our software stack."
So there you have it: Drive support was pulled because part of the software stack that made it possible had been orphaned.
The official release of Ubuntu 26.04 should be available on April 23, 2026.
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