Kubuntu 26.04 LTS — what went into the release, and how you can help
Kubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon is shaping up nicely, and I wanted to write up what actually went into this cycle from the team’s perspective — not just the feature highlights, but the quieter work that makes a release feel solid. And with the Release Candidate landing April 16, 2026, we need beta testers now.
Squashing long-standing bugs
One of the things I’m most proud of this cycle is the bug work. We made a serious dent in issues that had been sitting open for a long time — the kind of bugs that affect real users every day but tend to get deprioritized when shiny new features are competing for attention.
You can browse the full list of bugs we worked through on Launchpad — in-progress, fix committed, and fix released — on Launchpad. It’s a longer list than it might look at first glance.
New faces in #kubuntu-devel
This cycle brought some genuinely welcome new energy to #kubuntu-devel. Fresh contributors showed up, asked good questions, got their hands dirty with packaging and testing, and stuck around. That’s not something you can take for granted in a volunteer-driven project and it’s something the whole team should feel good about.
Open source projects live and die by contributor pipeline. Seeing new faces move from curious to contributing is one of the most encouraging things that can happen in a release cycle. If you’re one of those new contributors reading this — thank you, and please keep going.
Teamwork with KFocus
This release also saw some excellent collaboration with the KFocus team. KFocus builds KDE-focused laptops and has a real stake in Kubuntu working well on their hardware — which makes them natural allies and sharp-eyed testers.
The coordination was genuinely productive. Having a hardware partner engaged at the distro level, catching issues that only surface on real machines, is exactly the kind of collaboration that makes an LTS release more trustworthy for end users.
We need beta testers
The Release Candidate for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” is scheduled for April 16, 2026 — and that means we need people installing it, breaking it, and filing bugs before it ships to the world as an LTS.
If you have a spare machine, a VM, or even just the courage to run it on your daily driver, now is the time. Testing doesn’t require packaging knowledge or years of Linux experience — it requires curiosity and a willingness to report what goes wrong. Every bug found before release is a bug that doesn’t bite a new user.
Join us on #kubuntu-devel on Matrix to coordinate testing, ask questions, and report what you find. New contributors are very welcome — this is a great way to get started.
What’s next
Beyond the RC, 26.04 is an LTS — which means the next two years of SRU work and maintenance begins now. There’s also the usual post-release debrief of what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently next cycle.
If you’re running Kubuntu and it’s working well for you, consider letting the team know — and if you’re in a position to support the project financially, even a small donation goes a long way. You can donate at kubuntu.org/donate.