Thought Leadership
Canonical has released the beta of Ubuntu 26.10. The final version will follow on October 15, while Kubuntu offers official X11 support for the last time.
Canonical has released the beta version of Ubuntu 26.10, code-named “Stonking Stingray.” The final version is scheduled for October 15. It is an interim release with nine months of support, not a long-term support (LTS) release. Beta versions of official flavors are also available, including Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu MATE, which returns in this cycle.
OpenPGP in Rust
Canonical is continuing to replace classic system tools written in C with Rust implementations. In Ubuntu 26.10, the Rust-based library Sequoia-PGP handles OpenPGP encryption by default.
Voice Input With Myna
Also new is Myna, a tool for speech-to-text conversion based on large language models. Canonical had announced it in June. It is not pre-installed, but can be manually installed along with one of several speech recognition models.
GNOME 51 Without WEP
GNOME 51 “A Coruña” serves as the desktop environment. In the settings, it can now be specified that the touchpad is automatically disabled when an external mouse is connected. Mouse, touchpad, and trackpoint are configured in separate tabs. GNOME 51 no longer supports Wi-Fi networks using outdated WEP encryption. Additionally, the GNOME project dropped support for legacy Nvidia graphics chips during this development cycle. In the beta, according to The Register, an error message regarding missing themes appeared, affecting individual app icons. Linux kernel 7.3 is still in development.
A full installation with all optional packages occupied around 9 GB of storage space in testing by The Register, plus a swap partition. At idle, the system required approximately 1.2 GB of RAM.
Last Kubuntu With X11 Support
Kubuntu 26.10 uses KDE Plasma 6.7.5. Plasma 6.8 is scheduled for release later in October and will drop support for X11 entirely. It is expected to form the basis of Kubuntu 27.04. This makes Kubuntu 26.10 presumably the last version in which an X11 session is officially supported. It can still be installed post-installation via the package plasma-session-x11.
(Editorial Team)
