News · written 3 November 2026. A summary for readers, not upgrade or technical advice — check the official release notes at the end before you upgrade.

Ubuntu is one of the most widely used Linux distributions on desktops, servers and in the cloud. Canonical releases a new version every six months; every two years one of them is a long-term-support (LTS) release, and the ones in between are shorter "interim" releases that try out what comes next.

What happened

Canonical released Ubuntu 26.10, code-named "Stonking Stingray", on 15 October 2026. It is an interim release: the official release notes say it will be supported for 9 months, until July 2027. People who want five years of updates usually stay on the LTS release, Ubuntu 26.04.

What is new

• Rust core utilities. The basic command-line tools — the ones behind everyday commands such as cp, mv and rm — now run entirely on uutils, a rewrite in the Rust programming language, replacing the long-standing GNU versions by default.
• Linux kernel 7.3 and the GNOME 51 desktop.
• RISC-V: official support for RVA23 platforms, including SpacemiT K3 boards and the SiFive BigSky platform.
• Under the hood: dbus-broker by default, OpenSSL 4, the Sequoia PGP tools in the main archive (with gpg still available), MySQL 9.7 LTS and AMD ROCm 10.0.
• A preview of Myna, a speech-to-text tool.

What it means

• Rust is moving into the base system. Rust is designed to avoid whole classes of memory-safety bugs, and the core utilities run on almost every Linux machine. Having them on by default in a mainstream distribution is a big real-world test before the next LTS.
• If you write shell scripts, it is worth testing them on 26.10: uutils aims to behave like the GNU tools, but edge cases are exactly what an interim release is for finding.
• Some older things are gone — for example WEP Wi-Fi in Settings and support for legacy System V init scripts — and the release notes list known issues for upgrades from 26.04, including on systems with TPM-backed disk encryption. Read them before upgrading a machine you rely on.

Sources

• Canonical — Ubuntu 26.10 release notes (release date, support period, kernel, GNOME, Rust coreutils, RISC-V, removals and known issues).
• Ubuntu Discourse — Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) Beta released.

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