Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) progress

Matthieu Clemenceau has published
a status update from the Foundations Team on Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) development to the Ubuntu
Discourse forum. This includes updates on Ubuntu's adoption
of Dracut as an alternative to initramfs-tools, a move to
a single ISO for arm64 devices rather than device-specific images, and
reverting the planned O3 optimization flags for Plucky Puffin.

Earlier in this cycle, we announced
plans to enable the O3 optimization level for all Ubuntu packages
by default. As part of this effort, we conducted extensive
benchmarking, which revealed that while some workloads saw
improvements, overall system performance slightly declined, and binary
sizes increased. Given these results, we are likely to revert this
change soon.

The beta for Ubuntu 25.04 is planned
for March 27, with the final release scheduled on April 17.