Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) released

15 Oct 2026 at 11:35 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) released, as the latest upgrade to the popular Linux distribution. This is not a long-term support release, it's one of their in-between releases. It will be supported for 9 months, until July 2027.

In the post written up by developer Utkarsh Gupta they mentioned:

"Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 extends support for the latest hardware, alongside new RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images.

On the desktop, GNOME 51 brings improvements to responsiveness, accessibility, and usability, complemented by more consistent software management and greater resilience under memory pressure. Ubuntu 26.10 also introduces Myna, an opt-in, locally processed speech-to-text solution that marks the first step towards a more natural, context-aware desktop experience. With updated developer toolchains and expanded support for accelerated AI workloads, Ubuntu 26.10 continues to evolve Ubuntu as a secure, capable, and forward-looking open source platform."

For their main edition this now comes with GNOME 51 that has an array of new bits:

GNOME Highlights

• Performance: many enhancements to bring a smoother, more responsive desktop.
• Displays remembers monitor brightness across reboots and HDR changes. Frame scheduling improvements make animations smoother under load, and monitor arrangement uses improved center-aligned snapping.
• Settings adds an automatic screen rotation and orientation lock on devices with an accelerometer, improves display arrangement, and can disable the touchpad automatically when a mouse is connected. Network settings now support DNS search domains, and fingerprint enrollment has an improved interface.
• Files gives a count when dragging multiple files, improves selection behavior, groups file notifications, and performs some file operations more responsively.
• Calendar is more responsive, especially in Month view, and uses less data when syncing.
• Remote Desktop supports remote smartcard use and Kerberos authentication. Remote Login also supports SSH socket-activated servers.
• Papers can add visual signatures to documents. These are annotations and do not cryptographically verify a document’s authenticity.

Plus various upgrades across the desktop to improve accessibility. They also upgraded their App Center to bring together Snap and Debian packages in a unified less confusing way. Plus, driver management is also now available in the App Center.

The next major release will be Ubuntu 27.04 due April 2027.

Download from the official website.

🌐 External Sources: discourse.ubuntu.com, ubuntu.com Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Distro News, Kubuntu, Misc, New Release, Open Source, Ubuntu 8 Likes All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.