Canonical’s first interim release since 26.04 LTS finishes the Rust coreutils switch, swaps GnuPG out of APT and gives the desktop its first local AI feature.
Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed “Stonking Stingray,” is out today. It is a nine-month interim release, so it is not the one most people will park on for years, but it is where Canonical tries out what will end up in the next LTS. This cycle that means a new kernel, a finished Rust migration, a fresh approach to package signing and, for the first time, an AI feature sitting on the desktop. Canonical’s announcement and the release post on Ubuntu Discourse lay out the details.
Linux 7.3 and the hardware that comes with it #
The base is Linux 7.3, which Canonical pitches mostly as a hardware enablement story. It names Intel’s Xe3P graphics (Nova Lake), AMD Zen 6 and NVIDIA’s 615 driver series as the headline platforms, and the kernel also brings in-tree support for Lustre, the parallel file system used on big compute clusters. Mesa 26.2 handles the graphics stack on the user side.
There are two architecture-specific additions worth flagging. First, a dedicated amd64v3 installer, built for x86-64-v3 CPUs (roughly anything with AVX2), so newer machines get packages compiled for the instructions they actually have. Phoronix has already been measuring gains from those builds on AMD EPYC. Second, RISC-V finally gets desktop images, not just server ones, including support for the SpacemiT K3, the first RVA23-compliant board Ubuntu targets.
For AI work, ROCm in the archive moves up to version 10.0, which adds newer AMD GPU architectures and serving frameworks such as vLLM and SGLang. Toolchains are current across the board: GCC 15.2, LLVM 22.1, Python 3.14, Rust 1.97, Go 1.27 and Zig 0.16.
Rust coreutils done, GnuPG out of APT #
The Rust-based uutils coreutils, which started replacing the GNU versions of commands like ls, cp and friends over the last couple of releases, are now the complete default. This release is where the transition is declared finished.
The more interesting security change is in the package manager. APT now verifies repository signatures with Sequoia PGP, a Rust implementation, instead of GnuPG, and Canonical describes the setup as post-quantum ready. Separately, openCryptoki brings PKCS #11 3.2 tokens with ML-DSA and ML-KEM, the NIST post-quantum signature and key-exchange algorithms. TPM-backed full-disk encryption, introduced in 26.04 LTS, now also covers machines without a hardware root of trust, with an optional PIN or passphrase. Enterprise fleets also get tighter Microsoft Entra ID sign-in, including MFA and passwordless login.
GNOME 51 and Myna #
The desktop is GNOME 51, and Ubuntu has quietly made it more robust under the hood. dbus-broker replaces the old D-Bus daemon, with per-app message accounting meant to stop one misbehaving application from stalling the whole session, and the out-of-memory scoring has been retuned for heavy memory pressure.
Then there is Myna, a speech-to-text agent that runs on local models. It is opt-in for now, but Canonical says it will ship by default with 28.04 LTS, and its stated ambition goes well beyond dictation: the company’s example is telling the desktop to work out why your tests are failing and having it set up a workspace for you. Keeping inference on the machine is the right call from a privacy standpoint. Whether Linux desktop users want an agent at all is a different question, and the response to this preview will say a lot about how hard Canonical pushes it.
Should you upgrade? #
If you are on 26.04 LTS for stability, there is no rush; the kernel and Mesa bits will eventually arrive through the hardware enablement stack anyway. If you run brand-new silicon or want to try the RISC-V desktop, 26.10 is the obvious pick. Support lasts nine months, and 26.04 users who opted into all releases will see the upgrade offered automatically. All the official flavors, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, shipped 26.10 alongside it.