Ubuntu 26.10 release notes¶

These release notes cover new features and changes in Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray).

For the release schedule of Ubuntu 26.10, refer to the release schedule.

Support lifespan¶

Ubuntu 26.10 was released on 15 October 2026. It will be supported for 9 months, until July 2027.

For details, see Ubuntu release cycle.

Upgrades¶

To upgrade from a previous Ubuntu release, refer to the Ubuntu Desktop or Ubuntu Server guide.

New features and improvements¶

Desktop features¶

GNOME 51¶

Highlights across the desktop include:

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.

For more information, see the GNOME 51 release notes.

Accessibility improvements and fixes¶

Accessibility has been improved across GNOME, App Center, the desktop shell and the Flutter toolkit.

GNOME 51 comes with many accessibility enhancements:

The Reduced Motion setting has been extended to more parts of the desktop.
Users can adjust screenshot selections with the keyboard
Orca announcements and app-grid navigation have been improved.
The Accessibility settings gain an option to disable the focus-ring timeout.

New desktop wallpapers¶

Ubuntu 26.10 includes new Stonking Stingray wallpapers, including designs selected through the community wallpaper competition. See the wallpaper announcement.

Ubuntu Certified hardware status in Settings¶

Settings can show whether a computer is certified for Ubuntu.

The status is checked using the Ubuntu Hardware API, with caching to avoid unnecessary repeated checks. The hwctl client is included as a snap.

For information about hardware data used for certification checks, see the System Information Notice.

A unified app-details view in App Center¶

App Center now presents Snap and Debian package details in a unified app-details view. It brings information such as the publisher, ratings, permissions, version, package size, screenshots, and description together, with the relevant install, open, or uninstall action.

Driver management in App Center¶

App Center adds a dedicated Drivers page where you can review the available graphics drivers, including NVIDIA driver branches.

Driver choices are presented with clearer metadata to help you compare the options. Available choices depend on the system’s hardware and enabled software sources.

On-demand multimedia codecs¶

App Center can install the codecs needed for one-time playback when a media file uses a codec that is not installed. Some high-quality codecs are proprietary and are not included in the default installation.

Myna speech-to-text preview¶

Myna is an early speech-to-text preview for Ubuntu Desktop.

Hold a configurable key to dictate into the focused app. The transcription runs locally, with no audio sent to a network service.

Myna is not preinstalled, and its features may change before stable release.

Read the Myna technology preview announcement.

TPM-backed FDE without a hardware root of trust¶

Computers without a hardware root of trust can now be installed with TPM-backed full disk encryption (FDE), provided that a PIN or passphrase is also set on the TPM-backed key.

This was already backported in Ubuntu Desktop 26.04.1. For reference, see Hardware-backed disk encryption requirements.

Upgrade support on the horizon for systems running under TPM-backed FDE¶

While systems running under TPM-backed FDE will not be able to upgrade from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to Ubuntu 26.10 on release, we anticipate enabling these upgrades during the Ubuntu 26.10 lifecycle.

System-level opt-out for Ubuntu Insights¶

Administrators can now opt out of anonymous Ubuntu Insights system report collection for the entire system. Enabling the configuration overrides individual opt-ins such that they are instead interpreted as opt-outs. Users with sufficient permissions can change this setting, either in the Settings application or by using Ubuntu Insights’ command-line interface.

New window tiling interface¶

Ubuntu Desktop now shows a new popup when dragging a window to offer tiling layout options. (ubuntu/Tiling-Assistant#451)

D-Bus is now provided by `dbus-broker`¶

D-Bus is a message bus that lets processes communicate on a Linux system. The default D-Bus implementation has changed from dbus-daemon to dbus-broker.

Both the system bus and the per-user session bus are now provided by dbus-broker.

Thanks to its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, dbus-broker offers better accounting, reliability and scalability than dbus-daemon.

For details, refer to Ubuntu 26.10 is switching to dbus-broker.

Server features¶

FreeRADIUS 3.2.10¶

The FreeRADIUS software was updated to version 3.2.10. Highlights include:

Initial implementation of Protocol-Failure as per IETF draft
Suppress secrets by default in new installations (supress_secrets=true)
Many other improvements and bug fixes.

Please refer to the FreeRADIUS release notes for more details.

FRRouting 10.7.1¶

The FRRouting (frr) software was updated to version 10.7.1. Highlights include:

BFD authentication with keychain support (10.7.0)
BGP IPv6 VTEP support for EVPN (10.6.0)
BGP graceful restart for EVPN (10.6.0)
And many more improvements and bug fixes.

Refer to the respective release notes for more information:

HAProxy 3.4.2¶

HAProxy jumped two feature releases, from 3.2 to upstream version 3.4.2. HAProxy 3.4 is an LTS branch, supported upstream until 2031-Q2.

Some defaults were changed:

The default load balancing algorithm changed from roundrobin to random (power of two choices).
cpu-policy now defaults to performance, and the number of threads is no longer capped at 64.
Backends in mode http now enable option abortonclose by default.

See the HAProxy 3.3 and HAProxy 3.4 announcements for the complete list of changes.

iPXE 2.0.0¶

iPXE was updated from 1.21.1+git to 2.0.0. Highlights of changes:

support UEFI secure boot
support RISC-V and LoongArch64
download & boot autoexec.ipxe
EAPoL, port authentication, LLDP, initrd-style CPIO, DHC/ECDHE kex, GCM cipher, X25519, P-256/P-384 EC, ECDSA certs
dynamically created interactive forms
many new device drivers
reproducible builds