Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" Lands With Linux 7.3, GNOME 51 and a Finished Rust Coreutils Switch

Canonical has officially released Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed "Stonking Stingray" — the newest six-month, non-LTS update to the distribution. Arriving after April's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the release carries a broad sweep of updated packages.

What's new

At its core are the Linux 7.3 kernel in near-final shape and the GNOME 51 desktop, with other desktop options also available. The migration of the base Coreutils to a Rust implementation is now fully complete. TPM-backed full-disk encryption has been improved, as has enterprise authentication, and the graphics stack gets Mesa 26.2 drivers.

Notably, GCC 15 remains the default compiler.

New features and images

Ubuntu 26.10 ships a tech preview of Myna, a speech-to-text feature that is part of Canonical's push toward a context-aware desktop. The release also debuts desktop images for the RISC-V architecture alongside optimized amd64v3 install images.

In the author's benchmarking on Phoronix, the new release delivers solid performance gains over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, thanks to the newer kernel and other refreshed components.

All of the flavors shipped their 26.10 releases the same day as the official images: Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity and Xubuntu.

Source: Phoronix