Ubuntu 26.04 ships with hugo 0.154.5 which was released in 12th of January 2026, is what they froze for their 26.04 release. It won’t get major version APT updates until Ubuntu bumps packages for the next release freeze.
The problem with using outdated hugo packages is some themes may get constantly updated to work with latest hugo versions. I got one such as
WARN Module "blowfish" is not compatible with this Hugo version: 0.162.0/0.165.0 extended; run "hugo mod graph" for more information.which meant I need to have hugo version between 0.162.0 to 0.165.0 extended. If I want to ensure theme compatibility, Ubuntu 26.04 version is almost 4 months out of date since 0.162.0 was released in the 4th of April.
My recommendation: Always download DEBs from https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases