Ubuntu 26.10 Release: New Features, Download and How to Upgrade

Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed "Stonking Stingray," is officially released today, October 15, 2026. It is Canonical's latest interim release, shipping GNOME 51, a kernel built from the Linux 7.3 series, a core-utilities stack that now runs entirely on the Rust-based uutils implementation, and a signed-GRUB bootloader that drops support for several less-common /boot filesystem configurations. As an interim release rather than a Long Term Support (LTS) version, it gets roughly nine months of updates, running out in July 2027.

What's new in Ubuntu 26.10 at a glance

Stonking Stingray is a shorter-cycle release that sits between the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS released in April 2026 and the next LTS, Ubuntu 28.04, due in 2028. According to Canonical's own release notes, the headline technical changes are the completed migration of core utilities to Rust, a refreshed GNOME 51 desktop, a new default D-Bus implementation, and groundwork for signed GRUB booting. On the server side, Canonical lists MySQL 9.7 LTS, Valkey 9.1, Samba 4.24.7, HAProxy 3.4.2 and OpenSSH 10.5 (now split into GSSAPI and non-GSSAPI packages), alongside toolchain refreshes including GCC 15.2.0, Python 3.14.7, Go 1.27, Rust 1.97.1, LLVM 22.1.8 and OpenJDK 25.0.4.

The desktop team also lists a handful of smaller but visible changes: new default Stonking Stingray wallpapers, an "Ubuntu Certified" hardware status panel in Settings, a unified App Center app-details view with a new Drivers page, on-demand multimedia codec installation, and a preview of Canonical's Myna speech-to-text tool. Security-wise, Sequoia-PGP's sq and sqv tools now ship in the main archive alongside GnuPG, and OpenSSL 4 is included by default.

GNOME 51 desktop and interface changes

Ubuntu 26.10 moves to GNOME 51, the latest stable release of the GNOME desktop at the time Canonical froze the archive. Per the Ubuntu Desktop team's own 26.10 roadmap, this release is explicitly framed as groundwork for Ubuntu 28.04 LTS, built around four goals: a more consistent GNOME-based platform, simplicity with flexibility, a more context-aware desktop, and a trusted, integrated platform story. Concretely, that translates into a new window-tiling popup, continued work on a unified App Center (now with a dedicated Drivers page and on-demand codec installs), and a push toward a complete desktop experience on RVA23-compliant RISC-V hardware.

The roadmap also confirms that Ubuntu has finished moving its default message bus from the 22-year-old dbus-daemon to dbus-broker, a change aimed at faster boot and lower memory use rather than anything end users will notice directly. GNOME 51 itself brings accessibility and biometric refinements that carry through to Ubuntu's session, including a system-wide Reduced Motion toggle and a simplified fingerprint enrollment flow in Settings. None of this changes how everyday applications behave: editors, browsers and IDEs that already run on Ubuntu continue to work as before, including tools like Visual Studio Code, whose recent 1.142 update runs unmodified on the new release, and AI-assisted editors covered in Pandromeda's comparison of VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf.

Early coverage of the 26.10 development cycle, built from Canonical's roadmap previews rather than the finished release notes, reportedly pointed to broader native AI and assistant features arriving alongside Myna. What actually shipped and is confirmed on Canonical's own pages is narrower: Myna speech-to-text as a technology preview, plus the on-demand codec and App Center improvements described above. Anything beyond that should still be treated as unconfirmed until Canonical documents it directly.

Core utilities are now fully Rust: cp, mv and rm move to uutils

The most consequential under-the-hood change in 26.10 is also the one Canonical's release notes lead with: Ubuntu's default core utilities now run entirely on the Rust-based uutils implementation. Canonical had already swapped most of the GNU coreutils for their Rust-based uutils equivalents in earlier cycles; 26.10 finishes the job by migrating the last holdouts, cp, mv and rm, which had been kept on the traditional GNU versions because of lingering compatibility edge cases.

For most desktop and server users this change is invisible — uutils aims for drop-in command-line compatibility with the GNU tools it replaces, and Canonical's documentation includes a guide for switching between the Rust and GNU implementations for anyone who hits a behavioral difference in a script or an automated pipeline. Developers who rely on exact GNU coreutils error messages or less-common flags in shell scripts or CI jobs are the most likely to notice anything, and should test automation that shells out to cp, mv or rm before rolling 26.10 out broadly on build servers.

Kernel, toolchains and server-side updates

Ubuntu 26.10 ships on the Linux 7.3 kernel series. Because the final upstream 7.3 release lands after Ubuntu's own general-availability date, Canonical's release images are built against a late 7.3 release candidate rather than the finished upstream kernel — a routine timing quirk for interim releases, and one the release notes note explicitly. The kernel adds support for newer Snapdragon, AMD Zen 6 and Intel platforms, ships prebuilt NVIDIA 580 and 615 driver modules, and includes SPDX software bill-of-materials (SBOM) data for the amd64 and arm64 kernel packages. Canonical also highlights official support for SpacemiT K3 and SiFive BigSky RISC-V hardware and continued IBM Z improvements for enterprise users.

On the enterprise authentication side, authd 0.7.1 adds Microsoft Entra ID password sign-in, and ADSys 0.17.0 adds direct Active Directory Certificate Services enrollment — both aimed at organizations managing fleets of Ubuntu machines alongside Windows infrastructure.

Signed GRUB and the new /boot rules

Ubuntu 26.10 also tightens what Secure Boot-signed GRUB will boot from. Canonical's release notes confirm new /boot storage requirements tied to signed GRUB, and list several configurations being phased out: encrypted /boot partitions, software RAID-5 and RAID-6 arrays, Apple partition tables, and the Btrfs, HFS+, XFS and ZFS filesystems. According to Linux press coverage (OMG! Ubuntu), the signed-boot build in 26.10 keeps support for only a small set of /boot options: the ext4 and FAT filesystems, ISO9660 (used when booting from optical media or ISO images), and squashfs, which underpins snap packages under Secure Boot. Software RAID-1 mirroring remains supported.

The trimmed feature set only applies when Secure Boot is enabled and GRUB is running in its signed configuration; with Secure Boot off, the full GRUB feature set — including the filesystems being dropped from the signed build — is still available. Canonical's engineering rationale, as reported earlier in the cycle by Linux press covering the proposal, is that GRUB's less-common parsers and filesystem drivers have been a recurring source of security vulnerabilities, and trimming what a signed, trusted bootloader can parse reduces that attack surface. Anyone currently booting from Btrfs, ZFS, an encrypted /boot, or a RAID-5/6 array with Secure Boot enabled should check their configuration before upgrading, since Canonical's own notes flag this as a compatibility-affecting change rather than a cosmetic one.

Ubuntu 26.10 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Ubuntu 26.10 is not a replacement for the LTS line — it is a shorter-lived release aimed at developers, enthusiasts and anyone who wants the newest GNOME and toolchain versions sooner. The table below summarizes the practical differences for anyone deciding which to run.

How to upgrade to Ubuntu 26.10

The path to Ubuntu 26.10 depends on which release you're currently running, because Ubuntu's upgrade tool, do-release-upgrade, moves one release at a time.

From Ubuntu 26.04 LTS: 26.10 is the very next release after 26.04, so the upgrade is a single hop. On the desktop, open Settings → About, or run Software Updater, and accept the prompt if one appears. LTS installations default to a "LTS-only" upgrade policy, so interim releases like 26.10 often won't be offered automatically; to see it, open a terminal and check or edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades, setting Prompt=normal, then run:

Canonical's release notes flag one important caveat for 26.04 → 26.10 upgraders: systems using TPM-backed full disk encryption cannot upgrade to 26.10 at release time, with support expected later in the cycle. Systems with a dangling /lib32 symlink may also stall during the base-files install step, and should check for that before upgrading.

From Ubuntu 25.10: 25.10 is two releases behind 26.10, with 26.04 LTS in between, and the upgrade tool does not skip releases. 25.10 users need to upgrade to 26.04 LTS first using the same do-release-upgrade command, reboot, confirm everything works, and then run the upgrade a second time to move from 26.04 to 26.10.

As with any major version jump, back up important data first, remove or disable third-party PPAs before upgrading (the upgrader will typically comment them out automatically and keep a .distUpgrade backup of the original sources file), and make sure the system isn't set to suspend or hibernate mid-upgrade.

Download links

Ubuntu 26.10 is available now from Canonical's official Ubuntu Desktop download page, which lists separate installer images for Intel/AMD 64-bit (listed at roughly 5.9 GB) and Arm64 (roughly 4.3 GB) machines, alongside the existing Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS download. Server, RISC-V, IBM Z (s390x) and POWER (ppc64el) images are published on Canonical's release image server. As with every Ubuntu release, the ISOs are free to download and redistribute.

Release support window: how long until end of life

Ubuntu 26.10 is an interim release, not an LTS. Canonical's standard policy gives interim releases roughly nine months of security and maintenance updates from release day, which puts Ubuntu 26.10's end of life at approximately July 2027 — about the time Ubuntu 27.04 is expected to ship. That's a deliberately short window: interim releases exist to let Canonical and the wider ecosystem test desktop and toolchain changes (like the Rust coreutils migration and the signed-GRUB changes covered above) in public before they land in the next LTS, Ubuntu 28.04, rather than to serve as a long-term production base. Anyone running 26.10 on a server or production desktop should plan to move to the next release, interim or LTS, well before support runs out next July.

What's next

With Stonking Stingray out the door, Canonical's attention shifts to Ubuntu 27.04 and, further out, the Ubuntu 28.04 LTS that the Desktop team's roadmap explicitly says 26.10 is laying groundwork for. Expect the TPM-backed full disk encryption gap for LTS-to-26.10 upgrades to close with a 26.10 point release later in the cycle, and expect continued scrutiny of the signed-GRUB filesystem cuts as more users with Btrfs- or ZFS-based /boot setups hit the change firsthand. For now, Ubuntu 26.10 is a solid, low-drama interim release for anyone who wants GNOME 51 and a fully Rust-based coreutils stack ahead of the next LTS — just not one to put on a machine you can't reinstall again in nine months.

Written byFelix Moreau

Felix Moreau writes Pandromeda's software coverage and how-to guides. He covers Windows, macOS and Linux updates, the apps people rely on, emulators and developer tools, and turns official documentation into clear, numbered steps that work on the current version.

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