Ubuntu Stonking Stingray swims into spotlight with pre-release kernel

The latest interim release of Ubuntu is here, complete with kernel 7.3 – even though it isn't officially out yet. It also includes a new speech-to-text system that is intriguing but not fully useful.

Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" arrived on time. This is just a couple of weeks after the beta version that we looked at earlier this month, suggesting that the team didn’t encounter any show-stopper bugs.

The faster kernel release cycle that Canonical adopted in 2024 has slightly bitten them this time around: the Linux kernel’s new faster AI-boosted release cycle means that 7.2 is relatively old now, but 7.3 isn’t quite ready yet; at the time of writing, it’s on Release Candidate 7 – but Canonical has jumped the gun and used it anyway. So, the release version of Ubuntu 26.10 comes with a pre-release kernel, and machines will get updated to the completed 7.3 as soon as it’s available.

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We tried the default GNOME edition, with GNOME 51. It looks identical to the beta version. The most visible difference in this release is in the window-tiling assistant, which now displays a Windows-like transient pop-up box offering various tiled arrangements when you drag a window to the edge of the screen.

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The Myna speech-to-text tool, whose announcement we covered back in June, is now available – albeit as a technology preview. We tested the beta on an old ThinkPad, and while the pre-release OS ran perfectly, Myna didn't work. (Incidentally, after switching to a non-GPU LLM, it does work in the release version – just very slowly.)

So, we tried the release version on our newer testbed machine, a Dell XPS 9370. The installation process is more straightforward now, with some official instructions, and as the Dell doesn't have an unsupported Nvidia GPU to complicate things, it worked fine. The installation pulls in nearly a gigabyte of dependencies and language model files: since the installation ISO is already 6⅔ GB, it's probably a good thing that it’s not included.

We tested it in the Writer module of LibreOffice 26.8. Invoking it is as simple as pressing Super+J, and then talking. Using the laptop’s built-in microphone, accuracy was poor, but with a USB headset, it improved markedly. It’s a little odd to watch as the model revises the text as you go along, going back and altering words as later ones resolve ambiguities, but it did the job.

It doesn’t understand punctuation or commands: words such as "comma," "full stop," "new line," "delete," and so on, were entered into the document along with other text. For a preview, though, it's impressive, and for those who have problems with the use of their arms – such as the Reg FOSS desk just three years ago – this is a seriously useful extra. Ubuntu now just has to catch up with macOS and Windows, both of which have offered speech input for several years – but it's finally entered the race. This is one use of LLMs of which we heartily approve.

Fedora 45 is running late

Ubuntu’s on-schedule release contrasts with a delay in the Fedora 45 release process. According to a post on the devel-announce mailing list, no release candidate of Fedora 45 was ready, so Red Hat’s rapid-lifecycle community distro won’t be here for another week or so.

Alongside the flagship GNOME edition, all the flavors have been updated, which hasn't happened for about a year. For some flavors, this means new versions of their respective desktops, depending on the release cycle of the respective environment. As we said when we looked at the beta release, Kubuntu 26.10 comes with KDE Plasma 6.7.5, which is the final Plasma release to support X11.

Although Ubuntu MATE skipped the LTS release earlier this year, it's back with the Stonking release: Ubuntu MATE 26.10 will come as good news for fans of this retro GNOME 2 style desktop.

A year ago, Ubuntu Unity missed the 25.10 release, and 26.04 is not an LTS, so fans of Canonical's in-house desktop should take a close look at Ubuntu Unity 26.10. A visible change from previous releases is that it's picked up some accessory apps from the Lomiri desktop, which is the community continuation of what was going to be Unity 8. Ubuntu Unity 26.10 uses the Lomiri terminal emulator by default, and Lomiri's File Manager is available as an alternative to the default Nemo file manager. The "minimal" installation of this release is even more stripped back than Xubuntu Minimal – this version doesn't have the Snap subsystem installed at all.

Ubuntu Budgie 26.10 has the very latest Budgie desktop version 10.10.3, which brings some accessibility improvements. Ubuntu Cinnamon 26.10 has an updated version of Mint’s Cinnamon environment, too – it includes the very latest Cinnamon 6.6.9, released in June. Lubuntu 26.10 includes the latest LXQt 2.4, which arrived too close to the release of Lubuntu 26.04 to be incorporated.

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The other 26.10 flavors are more modest releases, which just pick up the latest versions of their components. Under the hood, there are some deeper changes that affect all editions. As we mentioned in the beta version, more core CLI tools have been replaced with new Rust versions, now including the NTP-sync daemon. Stonking replaces dbus-daemon with dbus-broker, and it uses systemd 261.3. The server version has been updated as well, and now includes AMD ROCm 10.0, OpenSSL 4, OpenSSH 10.5, and the Rust upki tool for revoking security certificates.

Canonical’s home-grown TPM-backed full disk encryption is present, but intrepid experimenters who have enabled that on 26.04 can't upgrade for now – this should follow later.

One of the benefits of increasingly mature FOSS desktops is that upgrades are increasingly routine, so long as you haven't rolled up your sleeves, lifted the hood, and started customizing the OS. If you just install packages from Snapcraft and leave the OS alone, interim versions are pretty safe these days, and so is the upgrade process. It's one way to avoid being nagged about Ubuntu Pro, if that irks you. Pro is not available on interim releases. By default, LTS versions don't automatically offer to upgrade to interim ones – if you want it, you must opt in. We suggest leaving it until the final version of the kernel, but otherwise, it’s already in good shape. ®