Canonical releases Ubuntu 26.10 Stonking Stingray

Key points

Canonical released Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" on October 15, 2026. This interim release adds an opt-in local speech-to-text agent, switches APT signature verification to Sequoia PGP, finishes the move to Rust-based coreutils and extends Microsoft Entra ID sign-in. Images are available from ubuntu.com/download.

Desktop

• Myna, a new speech-to-text agent, debuts as an opt-in feature. It uses on-device models, so speech is processed locally, and it shows visual feedback while the user talks.
• Canonical plans to keep developing Myna and to include it by default in Ubuntu 28.04 LTS. It is the first step on Canonical's AI roadmap for Ubuntu.
• Canonical describes a longer-term goal of intent-driven interaction. Its example is a developer asking the system to investigate failing tests.
• The desktop is GNOME 51, with better display handling, improved accessibility and updates to core applications.
• The Ubuntu App Center now handles snaps and debs in a more consistent way.
• Assistive tools such as the Orca screen reader can now read the content of Flutter applications more reliably.
• dbus-broker is now the default D-Bus implementation. It accounts for messages per application, so one app can no longer stall the desktop.
• Out-of-memory scoring on the desktop has been retuned to cope better with memory pressure in userspace.

Security

• The Rust-based uutils coreutils are now fully in place.
• Ubuntu Desktop authenticates against Microsoft Entra ID, with password plus MFA or passwordless sign-in. This puts Ubuntu machines under the same identity policies as Windows devices in the organisation.
• TPM-backed full-disk encryption, introduced in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, now also works on hardware without a Hardware Root of Trust. On those machines a PIN or passphrase can be required.
• APT repository signatures are now verified with Sequoia PGP instead of GnuPG. Canonical presents this as memory-safe and post-quantum-ready package signing.
• openCryptoki adds quantum-safe token support with PKCS #11 V3.2 coverage for Soft, EP11 and CCA tokens, including ML-DSA and ML-KEM.

Kernel and hardware

• The release ships Linux kernel 7.3, with enablement for Intel Xe3P (Nova Lake), AMD Zen 6 and NVIDIA 615. This includes rendering and power-management support for their CPU, GPU and media-decoder components.
• The kernel supports the Lustre parallel distributed file system out of the box.
• A dedicated installer is provided for amd64v3 hardware.
• RISC-V now gets desktop images in addition to the existing server images.
• RISC-V support includes the SpacemiT K3, the first hardware implementing the RVA23 profile.

AI and developer tooling

• ROCm in the archive moves to version 10.0, which adds new GPU architectures and support for the vLLM and SGLang serving frameworks. ROCm first entered the archive with 26.04 LTS.
• The toolchains are LLVM 22.1.6, GCC 15.2.0, Python 3.14.7, Rust 1.97.1, Zig 0.16 and Go 1.27.
• Spring AI is available on Ubuntu Desktop for the first time through the devpack for Spring, a snap that bundles current Spring versions.
• A devpack for Rust launches alongside the release, with version management and IDE support.

Getting it

• Download from ubuntu.com/download. The full release notes are linked from the announcement.
• The announcement also links to registration for Ubuntu Summit 26.10 and to the Ubuntu engineering team on Discourse.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.