prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) has been released today, and it is now available for download for those eager to update their Ubuntu systems to a newer release. Powered by the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel series, Ubuntu 26.10 ships with the latest GNOME 51 desktop environment, TPM-backed full disk encryption (FDE) support on computers without a hardware root of trust, updated Settings to show whether a computer is certified for Ubuntu, and 100% Rust coreutils. There are several App Center enhancements in Ubuntu 26.10, such as a unified app-details view for Snap and Debian packages, a dedicated Drivers page where you can review the available graphics drivers, including NVIDIA driver branches, and support for installing codecs for one-time playback when a media file uses a codec that's not installed.' Other additions include an optional, locally processed AI-powered speech-to-text tool called Myna, system-wide controls for disabling Ubuntu Insights data collection, and better integration with Microsoft Entra ID. Also worth mentioning are the security and software updates that will be available for nine months, through July 2027.

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Ubuntu 26.10 has landed.

Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 extends support for the latest hardware, alongside new RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images.

↫ Ubuntu 26.10 release announcement

Of course, it comes with the latest version of GNOME, and the whole family of Ubuntu variants focusing on other desktops have also been updated. While I doubt many people here run Ubuntu, it’s still quite popular, and serves as the base for countless other distributions.

On Thursday those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources on Thursday found the site "inoperable," reports Phoronix, with the disruption confirmed as a distributed denial of service attack. "Our team is working diligently to resolve the incident," according to a Thursday post on Ubuntu Discourse — followed by a later announcement. "At this time our team continues to work on restoring affected services, most of them are now available. We appreciate your patience and understanding." Ubuntu's status page shows the Ubuntu.com outage lasting for 2 hours and 27 minutes on Friday — though with four-hour outages Wednesday (and other outages affecting other Ubuntu sites). Today "All components are Operational," the status page reports.

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Ubuntu has been replacing core utilities with Rust rewrites, and it’s now completed the process.

cp, mv and rm were held back on their GNU versions in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due to a crop of TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) issues that needed to be fixed in the uutils versions. 

With those issues resolved upstream, Ubuntu 26.10 finishes the job. The ‘Stonking Stingray’ ships a full set of Rust core utilities, which encompasses common command-line tools like ls, cat, chmod and  du.

↫ Joey Sneddon at OMG! Ubuntu

I’m definitely not qualified enough to make any useful remarks about this, but the idea of replacing such foundational, battle-tested utilities with brand new ones, even when written in a memory-safe language, does make feel a little hesitant. Still, at least this way Ubuntu users can work out any issues so that if and when other distributions – like the one I use, Fedora – follows suit.

Ubuntu Touch, the mobile Linux operating system originally started by, you guessed it, Ubuntu, but now managed by UBports, released versions 24.04-2.0 and 24.04-1.4. The latter is a maintenance release with some bug fixes and minor changes, while the former is a bigger release with quite a few improvements, so let’s focus on that one.

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 updates the Chromium engine for the Morph browser from 87 to 134, which is massive leap forward, while still lagging behind the most recent version quite a bit. This release also adds a Widevine installer for people who want to view DRM-encumbered content on the web. This release also adds support for notches and rounded corners in smartphone displays, so that content in the UI can dodge these.

There’s also a screenshot editor for making basic edits to screenshots, as well as the ability to print straight from your device. Of course, there’s the usual list of bugfixes and smaller improvements, and, most importantly of all, support for over 2000 new emoji. Existing users can use the regular update tools, but do note that you’ll need to upgrade to 24.04-1.4 first, since it contains some provisions to enable the 24.04-2.0 update.

If I had any of the listed supported devices, I would definitely want to do a proper review of Ubuntu Touch. It seems like it has made so much progress in recent years.