Ubuntu 26.10, “Stonking Stingray,” has entered beta testing, slightly later than planned – it is in fact scheduled to be released on October 15. While many people will stay with the LTS version, there’s some interesting stuff in there. There are already some release notes, but like the OS itself, they aren’t final yet, and there are still some gaps. Canonical does note that the "oxidization" process – exchanging core Unix tools written in C with new Rust replacements – goes further in this edition: now, the stock OpenPGP encryption support is via the Rust-based Sequoia-PGP. Perhaps one of the most daringly different new features is Canonical’s promised LLM-powered Myna speech-to-text tool. This isn’t installed by default, but you can add it, and a choice of speech-recognition models. We found various sets of instructions, including the unofficial “Ubuntu Handbook”. Our geriatric testbed was a little old for this, though, and we couldn't try it. A couple of weeks ago we took at look at the beta of what will become Fedora 45. Both Ubuntu 26.10 and the default workstation edition of Fedora will use GNOME 51, but since the Fedora beta, the final release of the latest GNOME is here: GNOME 51 “A Coruña”. The version in the Ubuntu beta isn’t working completely smoothly. We saw a persistent error about missing themes, and although the OS offered to install whatever was missing automatically, this failed. Since it doesn’t actually say what is missing, we can’t install it ourselves. The problem is only cosmetic: just some missing icons in applications, very similar to what we saw in Alpine Linux 3.16 four years ago. Sadly, problems around GNOME themes are a long standing issue. As we reported earlier this year, the Linux Mint developers are still struggling with them. The occasional missing icon aside, though, Stonking works pretty well. We tried both in a Virtualbox VM and on bare metal on our old testbed Thinkpad W520, and it ran well in both. The new installation program that arrived with the 2024 LTS version works fine, and now makes it much clearer which control is currently selected with an orange highlight. We do wish the window was resizable, though. The testbed machine has two SATA drives and we had to do a lot of scrolling to choose the right partitions. It also failed to use our dedicated swap partition, although we selected it during installation. Although GNOME 51 removed their support for old Nvidia devices in this development cycle, it still picked up and used the machine’s Nvidia-controlled Displayport output. It didn’t work perfectly: GNOME couldn’t report on the model or properties of our Quadro 1000 GPU, or the CPU-integrated Intel one for that matter, but at least the second screen worked. More surprisingly, it even worked in the Fallback session, even though that uses the Metacity X11 window manager – and while logged into to a Fallback session, it could identify both GPUs. GNOME 51 isn’t a very feature-heavy release, but the Settings app has some useful additions, such as the ability to automatically disable the trackpad when an external mouse is connected. In our testing, it picked up and let us configure mouse, trackpad, and trackpoint, each in a separate tab. GNOME 51 no longer supports Wi-Fi networks with the old WEP encryption system, though. Modern Linux continues to move away from being an OS for old and low-end hardware. If the machine is online during installation, the installer fetches any package updates as it works, so the first update post-install is much quicker. However, this doesn’t apply to Snap packages: the .deb package phase of our first update was very fast, but we got various new snaps. One detail we haven’t noticed before is that while a snap application is updating, its dock icon temporarily gets a progress bar to tell you it’s being updated. We did a full install with all the optional extras, so this applied to Thunderbird as well as Firefox. A full installation took a fairly hefty 13 GB of disk space, although to be fair, that included 4GB of swap space – so in real money, it’s about 9 GB, which isn’t too bad for 2026. According to the htop command, it idles at about 1.2 B RAM, which is quite high, but then GNOME is no lightweight. Linux kernel 7.3 is still in development, but at the time of writing it’s up to RC5, and our testing ran without a hitch. The final version may be out before “Stonking” is completed, but if not, users will get it very soon afterwards. We also gave the Kubuntu desktop a very brief try. In this release, it uses Plasma 6.7.5, and ran well – it was fast, smooth, and happily drove both screens of our testbed machine; helpfully, on our first login, it asked where the second display was relative to the first. If you want modern Wayland niceties such as different dots-per-inch settings on different screens, but you also want a traditional Windows-style layout, KDE is currently the way to go. Plasma 6.8 is scheduled for later this month, and totally drops X11 support. It’s likely to be the desktop in Kubuntu 27.04, making it Wayland-only – so 26.10 is probably the last ever version of Kubuntu in which displaying your desktop thanks to X.org is a supported option. We installed X11 support, which is just one command: sudo apt install -y plasma-session-x11 This brings in multiple extra dependencies, which is why we specified the -y switch, but it took just seconds. We logged out, logged back again choosing “Plasma (X11)”, and… Everything looked absolutely identical. Which is how it should be, of course. Both screens were working normally, thanks to the Nouveau FOSS NVIDIA driver. The only visible differences are the classic “wobbly window” effect when moving windows around, and that the title-bar context menu regains the option to “shade” a window: roll it up, leaving only the title bar visible. You can’t do this in a Wayland environment. Under Wayland, htop reports about 1.2 GB in use; under X.org, about 1.3 GB. The resurrected Oxygen theme from KDE 4 is built in, if you want a bit more visual bling, but we preferred the flatter grayer look of the default Breeze theme. The only freeze that we saw in all our testing of the Stonking beta was after logging out of a Plasma (Wayland) session and trying to log back in using Plasma (X11). To be fair, we suspect most people wouldn’t chop-and-change this much. Ubuntu Stonking is shaping up well. Aside from the small theme-related glitches, GNOME worked fine, and KDE didn’t even have those minor issues. The equivalent beta versions of all the official flavors are also available, including both Ubuntu Unity 26.10 and Ubuntu MATE. Despite a hundred other distros, Ubuntu remains the go-to desktop Linux for most people. While Canonical is getting slightly more experimental with interim releases again, this is a mature product now and they’re a pretty safe bet. ®
