The Ubuntu 25.04 release shipping this month will now feature JPEG-XL image format support out-of-the-box.
For a while now there’s been a push to integrate JPEG-XL image format support out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. Finally with Ubuntu 25.04 releasing next week that milestone is being realized after a very last minute landing of the JPEG-XL support in Ubuntu 25.04 by default.
Following last minute feature freeze exceptions finally going through with the release and MIR teams, the Ubuntu 25.04 desktop by default will ship with JPEG-XL support. JPEG-XL is a nice improvement over JPEG with much better compression efficiency and competitive to other modern alternatives like AVIF and WebP. But it has faced some setbacks with Google Chrome having dropped JPEG-XL and adoption of this image format being rather slow.
In any event as Ubuntu desktop engineer Jeremy Bicha at Canonical announced this week, thanks to the last minute efforts JPEG-XL is now found by default for the Ubuntu 25.04 desktop. It’s here at last. In prior releases of Ubuntu Linux, JPEG-XL via the “jpeg-xl” package has been available in the Ubuntu Universe archive for those wanting to manually enable JPEG-XL image support.
