Ubuntu 26.10 Stonking Stingray: Rust coreutils, post-quantum-ready signing, kernel 7.3

Serguey Asael Shinder17 October 2026, 08:322 min read

Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed "Stonking Stingray", was announced on the ubuntu-announce mailing list on 15 October 2026 by Utkarsh Gupta of Canonical. It is an interim release built on top of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and like every interim release it gets nine months of maintenance updates, for the main edition and for all official flavours released alongside it.

Security and the base system. The announcement puts three items first. The release completes the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils. Package signing is described as post-quantum-ready. And support for TPM-backed full-disk encryption has been expanded. For enterprise logins, integration with Microsoft Entra ID goes deeper, now covering password and multi-factor authentication.

Kernel and hardware. Ubuntu 26.10 ships Linux 7.3, which the announcement says extends support for the latest hardware. Two new kinds of images appear: RISC-V desktop images and optimised amd64v3 installation images.

Desktop. The default desktop moves to GNOME 51, with improvements to responsiveness, accessibility and usability, more consistent software management, and better behaviour under memory pressure. Canonical also introduces Myna, an opt-in speech-to-text feature that is processed locally on the machine; the announcement calls it a first step towards a more natural, context-aware desktop. Developer toolchains have been updated, and support for accelerated AI workloads has been expanded; the announcement does not list versions.

Flavours. Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity and Xubuntu were released the same day, each with its own section in the release notes.

Upgrading. Users of Ubuntu 26.04 are offered an automatic upgrade to 26.10 only if they have chosen to be notified of all releases rather than LTS releases alone; machines on the default LTS-only setting stay on 26.04. The project asks everyone to read the release notes first, because they document known issues and workarounds. Images are on the download page, and Canonical's press release has the marketing overview.

What the announcement does not say is how the Rust coreutils switch affects scripts that depend on GNU-specific behaviour, or which algorithm the post-quantum-ready signing uses. The announcement points to the release notes for caveats and known issues.

Source: Ubuntu, "Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) released" — https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2026-October/000330.html