Relatively speaking, updates are relatively uncommon on released versions. For development releases, it’s not uncommon to see most of the packages on the system get updated in a 24 hour period. For supported releases, that’s something you’ll likely never see.
To illustrate this, let’s consider a couple points:
- 24.04 was released April (04) 2024 (24)
- 24.04 came with linux 6.8.0-31.31 (this in the form of various packages, but ultimately derives from the source package linux-meta)
- Currently, the most recent version available for 24.04 is 6.8.0-39.39
- It took 5 changes of the package to get to that (chaneglog here)
In other words, in the 3 months since the new version of Lubuntu was released, the package was changed 5 times, or roughly 0.057 times per 24 hour period.
I picked that package because it’s a core component of all variants of Ubuntu and because the security of the kernel is of greater importance than nearly any other software package. Needless to say, it does get regular security updates.
For what it’s worth, the upstream kernel is regularly updated. 6.8.0 was released 10 March and the most recent minor version of it, 6.8.12, was released 30 May. Since then, it was superceded by 6.9, released 13 May, which is now on 6.9.12, released 27 July.
I bring that up to illustrate a fact: though bug fixes and security updates are to be expected, whole new versions of software even when they’re available upstream are not. None of the currently supported versions of Ubuntu ever got a brand new version of the kernel in their many updates to the linux-meta source package. Put a different way: I would expect 24.04 to always run on 6.8.0, just as I expect that 20.04 will always run on 5.4.0.
There are some exceptions to this, albeit rare ones. Browsers are important to keep updated for security reasons. Look at Firefox. In 20.04 (I’m not mentioning versions after this because then they switched to using Snaps), it started with 75.0 and is currently on 128.0. However, part of that is driven by how often Firefox is updated, the popularity it has, and how much scrutiny and attention it gets. Compare that to Falkon, which has not changed within releases and has barely changed across them.
So now let’s take a look at something closer to home: pcmanfm-qt, LXQt and thus Lubuntu’s default file manager. LXQt as a whole has had a pretty good track record for the past few years of getting new releases in April and November. In between, we sometimes see occasional updates to individual components. In between 1.4.0 (November 2023) and 2.0.0 (April 2024), there was one intermediate release 1.4.1 in February. 1.4.0 was added to the Noble development release (what would become 24.04) in November and the new version released in February. So you would have got the update if you would have been using the development release (not necessarily recommended, BTW).
However, with 24.10 coming in October and the next release of LXQt coming (likely) in November, we’re not likely to see a version much greater than 2.0.0. We actually have yet to get that in the current development release because of a complex dependency chain we’re working through with the transition to Qt6. Point being here that even with the new software being available, it’s still not in the repositories.
tl;dr don’t expect many updates so often