Tras 6.7, a week to collect requests and another not very pleasant due to the weather, Linus Torvalds launched a few hours ago Linux 6.8-rc1. It is the first Release Candidate of the next stable version, and its size is smaller than usual. This contrasts with the previous merger window, which arrived with the largest size ever and with many new features. The reason for the size, according to the father of Linux, is related to the holidays.
For everything else, the most notable news is perhaps the "unpleasant weather", although no further details have been given. That this is the highlight means that everything has gone as expected in the last two weeks, with a few "technical hiccups."
Linux 6.8 will arrive in March
“It hasn't been the most pleasant merge window, but most of the annoyances had nothing to do with the code base and almost all of them were related to bad weather. Just some technical hiccups. And after a very large 6.7 version, the 6.8 appears to actually be smaller than average, although not that significantly.
And while it may be a little smaller than usual (I blame the holidays), overall everything seems pretty normal. Most of it is driver updates (GPU and network drivers are the big areas as always, but there's a little bit of everything), but we also have a good chunk of file system updates (mainly core vfs, bcachefs, xfs and btrfs) and, obviously, all the usual architectural updates.
If nothing very strange happens, Linux 6.8 will arrive in march. The accounts say that the seventh RC would arrive on the 3rd and the stable version on the 10th, delaying that by seven days if an eighth Release Candidate was needed and by seven more if something was released that I personally don't remember having seen, the ninth. In all cases it falls within March.
And considering that Ubuntu 24.04 will arrive on April 25, it is more than likely that this will be the version of Linux that uses the next LTS version of Canonical's operating system and its official flavors. Therefore, Ubuntu users who want to install it when the time comes will not have to do anything, at least those coming from 23.10, beyond updating the operating system. And they have to do it, or in July they will be left without support.
Users of 22.04 and other LTS versions will have to wait a little longer, but will end up being able to upgrade to that kernel version as part of the HWE (hardware activation). Anyone who wants to keep the version they brought can continue this tutorial.