Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has just been released and as usual it's on our minds, although not as much so as Ubuntu 22.04 was. So once again I feel like doing a quick review of the state of Python in 24.04, as I did for 22.04. Since Fedora 40 has also just been released I'm going to throw that in too.

The big change between 22.04 and 24.04 for us is that 24.04 has entirely dropped Python 2 packages. There is no CPython 2, which has been unsupported by the main Python developers for years, but there's also no Python 2 version of PyPy, which is supported upstream and will be for a long time (cf). At the moment, the Python 2 binary .debs from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS still install and work well enough for us on Ubuntu 24.04, but the writing is on the wall there. In Ubuntu 26.04 we will likely have to compile our own Python from source (and not the .deb sources, which don't seem to readily rebuild on 24.04). It's possible that someone has a PPA with CPython 2 for 24.04; I haven't looked.

(Yes, we still care about Python 2 because we have system management scripts that have been there for fifteen years and which are written in Python 2.)

In Ubuntu 22.04, /usr/bin/python was an optional symbolic link that could point to either Python 2 or Python 3. In 24.04 it is still an optional symbolic link, but now your only option is Python 3. We've opted to have no /usr/bin/python in our 24.04 installation, so that any of our people who are still using '#!/usr/bin/python' in scripts will have them clearly break. It's possible that in a few years (for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if we use it) we'll start having a /usr/bin/python that points to Python 3 (or Ubuntu will make it a mandatory part of their Python 3 package). If nothing else, that would be convenient for interactive use.

Ubuntu 24.04 has Python 3.12.3, which was released this past April 9th; this is really fast work to get it into 24.04 (although since Canonical will be supporting 24.04 for up to five years, they have a bit of a motivation to start with the latest). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fedora 40 is a bit further behind, with Python 3.12.2. Both Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40 have PyPy 7.3.15. Ubuntu 24.04 only has the Python 3.9 version of PyPy 3; Fedora has both the 3.9 and 3.10 versions.

Both Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40 have pipx available as a standard package. Fedora 40 has version 1.5.0; Ubuntu 24.04 is on 1.4.3. The pipx changelog suggests that this isn't a critical difference, and I'm not certain I'd notice any difference in practice.

I suspect that Fedora won't keep its minimal CPython 2 package around forever, although I don't know what their removal schedule is. Hopefully they will keep the Python 2 version of PyPy around for at least as long as the upstream PyPy supports it. Fedora has more freedom here than Ubuntu does, since a given Fedora release only has to be supported for a year or so, instead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS's five years (or more, if you pay for extended support from Canonical).

PS: Ubuntu 24.04 has Django version 4.2.11, the latest version of the 4.2 series, which is a sensible choice since the Django 4.2 series is one of the Django project's LTS releases and so will be supported upstream until April 2026, saving Canonical some work (cf).