The big news came from the Canonical camp. Ubuntu developers have officially approved a long-planned move affecting a fundamental system component: starting with Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka,” the distro will switch from initramfs-tools to Dracut as its default initramfs generation tool.
For readers who aren’t too tech-savvy, I will immediately clarify that the initramfs is the temporary root filesystem the Linux kernel uses at boot. It contains the drivers and scripts needed to mount the actual system and get everything running. And just for reference, Ubuntu has relied on initramfs-tools for nearly two decades.
Surprising to many or not, Dracut was originally developed in the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem. What makes it stand out is that, instead of relying on big sets of custom shell scripts, it builds the initramfs image using small, reusable modules.
This modular design makes it easier to maintain, more consistent across different Linux distros, and often faster to update.
This transition has actually been in the works for about a year. Here’s how things unfolded:
- Ubuntu 24.10: Dracut is available for manual testing, but initramfs-tools remains the default.
- Ubuntu 25.04: Dracut becomes an official alternative. Users and developers can opt in, but initramfs-tools still ships by default.
- Ubuntu 25.10 (October 2025): Dracut replaces initramfs-tools as the default initramfs tool.
- Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (April 2026): The long-term plan is to fully deprecate initramfs-tools, possibly moving it out of the main repositories.
So, the big question – what does it mean for users? Frankly, for most people, this change will be invisible. Systems will continue to boot normally, and updates won’t suddenly behave differently.
Where it matters is behind the scenes: the initramfs generation process becomes more standardized, aligning Ubuntu with other distros like Fedora and openSUSE that already rely on Dracut. This can be considered a little strange, especially since the distro comes from the Debian family, where initramfs is the standard.
All in all, this feels like a significant change under the hood of the distribution. And while it might come as a bit of a surprise, I’d say it’s a step in the right direction.
