According to Canonical's Utkarsh Gupta, we'll have to wait a little longer for the next update to the current Ubuntu 24.04 release. It seems that the latest images are missing something beneficial to more recent hardware.
Originally scheduled for a February 13 release, Ubuntu 24.04.2 is a point release, a refreshed release that includes all of the latest updates, bug fixes and upgrades since the original Ubuntu 24.04 image was released. If you are using Ubuntu 24.04, then updating and upgrading your software packages will keep your install up to date. Point releases are more useful for those installing to a new machine, and not wanting to spend too long downloading updates, or for those with a slower internet connection.
Gupta reports that "Due to an unfortunate incident, it appears that some 24.04.2 images built this week did not include the HWE kernel. To be consistent across all images, we've decided to respin the images and delay the Noble 24.04.2 by a week.
The new release date for 24.04.2 will be 20th February 2025."
In light of the issue, Gupta states that the there will be a "a proper retrospective to prevent this from happening in the future."
So what is HWE kernel? Hardware Enablement is essentially a means for non-rolling release Linux distros to "catch up" with the latest hardware via an updated kernel. It has been almost a year since Ubuntu 24.04 was released, and in that time there has been a plethora of new CPUs and other PC hardware components.
So right now the team are rebuilding the ISO images with the correct kernel for HWE. This also means that they images will need to be retested before the February 20 release date.
Ubuntu 24.04 is the latest LTS (Long Term Support Release) of the popular Debian based Linux distro, and it has been plagued by delays. Codenamed "Noble Numbat", Ubuntu 24.04 first point update, 24.04.1 suffered a two week delay back in August 2024 due to a number of "high-impact upgrade bugs". Earlier in the release cycle, Noble Numbat's Beta release was delayed due to malicious code in the XZ compression tools. It seems that the Noble Numbat is unable to catch a break.
If you can't wait, then Ubuntu 24.04.1 is the current point release and it will be upgradeable to match 24.04.2 via the OS package management tools.
