Ubuntu 26.10 Beta is Available After A One-week Delay

Ubuntu 26.10, code-name Stonking Stingray, is now available for beta testing!

The Beta was released last night, one week behind the scheduled date. The Ubuntu Team announced:

The Ubuntu Release team is pleased to announce the Beta release of the Ubuntu 26.10 Desktop, Server, WSL, and Cloud products.

Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed “Stonking Stingray”, continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

What’s New in Ubuntu 26.10

Ubuntu 26.10 is a short term release with 6-month support until July 2027, which features GNOME Desktop 51 and Linux Kernel 7.3.

Thanks to the latest Kernel, it includes drivers and improvements for new hardware support, better performance, and various security and other fixes.

The Ubuntu Desktop features smoother desktop animation, out-of-the-box “New Document” context menu, automatic screen rotation for display with an accelerometer. However legacy NVIDIA driver may no longer work as GNOME 51 removed the code for it. See GNOME 51 Release note for details.

In addition, Ubuntu added new hwctl command line tool and option in “Settings -> System” to check if your computer is one of the certified devices that are tested for the best Ubuntu experience.

The window tiling system has been improved with a layout indicator. When you dragging a window to top center, it will show you the layout grid, allowing you to quickly snap the window into a specific grid section.

Other changes include:

amd64v3 iso image.
Rust-based cp, mv, and rm.
Support for multiple RVA23 RISC-V platforms: SpacemiT K3 boards (Pico-ITX, CoM260 kit), SiFive BigSky platform.
Myna speech to text (only extension so far).
GCC 15.2.0, .NET 10.0.112, Go 1.27, LLVM 22.1.6, OpenJDK 25.0.4, Python 3.14.7, Rust 1.97.1, Zig 0.16.

For more about Ubuntu 26.10, see the official release note.

Download Ubuntu 26.10

The images for Desktop, Server and WSL on modern Intel and AMD are available to download in the link below:

Download Ubuntu 26.10

For amd64v3, arm64, and other CPU architecture types, they are available to download HERE.

And, Ubuntu 26.04 is now able to upgrade to the Ubuntu 26.10 Beta by following steps:

First install all available package updates via either “Software Updater” or sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade command. Then restart computer.
Edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades file and change Prompt=lts to Prompt=normal, so it check every new Ubuntu releases rather than only LTS.
Finally, either run update-manager -d to get the “Upgrade” button in Software Updater, or run do-release-upgrade -d to upgrade from command line interface.