Ubuntu 25.04 Working To Better Cope With BitLocker-Enabled Windows, Other Improvements

Jean Baptiste Lallement was recently appointed at Canonical as the new Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop. Jean Baptiste Lallement has a decade and a half history at Canonical working on Ubuntu QA, Ubuntu Phone / Unity, and other projects while now he is leading the charge on further enhancing the Ubuntu desktop initiatives. As somewhat of a mid-point for the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle, he published a Discourse post on Friday to outline some of the recent and ongoing improvements for the Ubuntu desktop.

As previously covered, Ubuntu 25.04 will be using the GNOME 48 desktop by default. There are a wealth of upstream improvements to find with GNOME 48 that make it a very exciting release. Ubuntu is also replacing Evince with Papers as the default PDF reader, among other changes.

Ubuntu 25.04 on the desktop side is also transitioning to BeaconDB for their geo-location service after Mozilla announced the retirement of their platform.

Ubuntu also continues to evolve its modern desktop installer. In particular, they are working on advanced partitioning options, more encrypted install options, and also better coping with systems having BitLocker-encrypted Windows 11 installations. With existing Ubuntu desktop installations, the installer has bailed out when sensing BitLocker-enabled Windows installations.

Ubuntu installer hitting BitLocker


The current handling of the Ubuntu desktop installer when hitting a BitLocker-enabled Windows installation on the system has been a frustrating nuisance... Especially if just wanting to blow away the Windows OEM installation on a new system.

Canonical is also making it easier to auto-install Ubuntu across a fleet of desktop systems using their Landscape service.

Ubuntu 25.04 is also working on more changes under the hood for Ubuntu Core, continued enhancements for enterprise users of Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) advancements on Windows 11 like supporting the new Tar-based WSL distribution format.

Those wanting to learn more about these Ubuntu desktop happenings can do so via this Ubuntu Discourse post.

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Firefox 137 To Support HEVC/H.265 Video Playback On Linux With VA-API

Anticipated for the April release of the Mozilla Firefox 137 web browser is finally supporting HEVC (H.265) video playback in an accelerated manner using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API).

Merged today to the Firefox code set to become Firefox 137 is the enabling of HEVC accelerated playback using the VA-API driver, which in turn can be used by the Mesa Gallium3D VA state tracker and other Linux GPU drivers as well as the NVIDIA binary GPU driver when using an additional layer.

For the past ten months has been this support request to enable HEVC via the VA-API interface on Linux. This follows Mozilla having enabled accelerated HEVC playback under Microsoft Windows back with Firefox 120 using the Media Foundation Transform "MFT" library.

Firefox VA-API HEVC


As of today all the HEVC VA-API patches for Firefox have been merged and set to be part of Firefox 137 in early April barring any last minute issues from being reported.

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Wine 10.2 Upgrades VKD3D, Supports Setting Thread Priorities

Following last month's release of Wine 10.0 one month ago, Wine 10.2 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release that will culminate with the Wine 11.0 stable release in early 2026.

Fresh into the new annual development cycle, Wine 10.2 is hearty on merging new feature code that's been baking since the Wine 10.0 feature freeze that began in early December. Wine 10.2 adds support for setting thread priorities, provides a new dynamic WoW64 mode that can be enabled as needed, and continues recent work around the Wine Bluetooth driver. Wine 10.2 also integrates the VKD3D 1.15 layer for implementing Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan for enhancing Windows games/applications on Linux.
- Bundled vkd3d upgraded to version 1.15.
- Support for setting thread priorities.
- New Wow64 mode can be enabled dynamically.
- More progress on the Bluetooth driver.
- Various bug fixes.

There are 20 known bug fixes for the past two weeks ranging from a Cyberpunk 2077 game fix to Final Fantasy XI Online crash fix, a Guild Wars fix, and various other game and app fixes.

Downloads and more details on the Wine 10.2 changes via WineHQ.org.

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