Image: Ubuntu Party / CC BY-SA 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
In short: Canonical released Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" on 15 October 2026. It ships Linux 7.3, GNOME 51, coreutils fully migrated to Rust and Mesa 26.2 graphics drivers. There's also a new driver page in App Center and a preview of local dictation called Myna. As an interim release, it gets 9 months of support until July 2027. For stability, stay on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
Key changes
| Area | New in 26.10 |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Linux 7.3 |
| Desktop | GNOME 51 |
| Graphics | Mesa 26.2 |
| Compiler | GCC 15 |
| Platforms | RISC-V desktop images, amd64v3 images |
GNOME 51
According to the release notes, GNOME 51 makes animations smoother under load, remembers screen brightness across reboots, adds automatic screen rotation, can turn off the touchpad when a mouse is connected and makes Calendar faster. Remote Desktop supports smartcards and Kerberos, and Papers can add visual signatures, which are annotations rather than cryptographic signatures. Accessibility has also improved.
App Center, Myna and security
App Center now shows Snap and Debian packages in one view, adds a driver page including Nvidia driver branches and can install missing codecs on demand. Myna lets you hold a key and dictate into any app; transcription runs locally, so no audio is sent online. It isn't preinstalled and may still change. PCs without a hardware root of trust can now use TPM-backed full-disk encryption if a PIN or passphrase is set.
How to get it
For a fresh install, download the image from the official Ubuntu website, write it to a USB stick of at least 8 GB and boot from it; you can try Ubuntu before installing. If you run 25.10, the Software Updater offers the upgrade once it is enabled for your system, which may take a few days because rollouts are gradual. On 26.04 LTS you only get LTS upgrades by default; to move to 26.10, change the notification setting in Software & Updates to "For any new version", and remember you will then need to upgrade every nine months. Settings can also now show whether your computer is certified for Ubuntu.
Should you upgrade?
Stay on 26.04 LTS if you value stability. Upgrade if you want newer hardware support. Coming from Windows 10? Read about the extended security updates and our AI tools guide. All official flavours, including Kubuntu and Xubuntu, were released too. More in the Linux section.
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