When you install Ubuntu 26.10, you get the newest desktop Canonical ships today, and in return you agree to move again by July 2027. Stonking Stingray landed on October 15 with GNOME 51, a kernel from the 7.3 line, dbus-broker as the message bus and the remaining GNU tools (cp, mv and rm) swapped for their Rust rewrites. It’s the release to try if you want an early look at where Ubuntu is heading.
You’ll download and check the right ISO, write it to a USB stick, step through every installer screen with LUKS disk encryption, and then confirm on your own machine what actually changed. The install took nine minutes on our lab VM, and two things caught us out: the hardware-backed encryption option refuses to run inside a virtual machine, and the download folder still lists the beta ISOs right beside the final ones.
Installed from the final 26.10 desktop ISO in October 2026, and every screen below comes from that run.
Decide between Ubuntu 26.10 and 26.04 LTS
Start with the support clock, because it matters more than any feature. Ubuntu 26.10 is an interim release, and the distro-info data on the installed system ends its support on 2027-07-15, while 26.04 LTS runs until 2031-05-29 on the same file. So you will be upgrading to 27.04 within nine months, and an interim release only makes sense on a machine you’re happy to keep moving. It’s a good fit when these sound like you:
- You want GNOME 51 and the 7.3 kernel line now, not when they reach an LTS.
- You need to test your own scripts against an all-Rust set of core utilities.
- Your laptop is new enough that a fresh kernel and Mesa make a visible difference.
- You’re comfortable running a release upgrade again before next July.
Family machines, servers and anything you set up once and forget belong on 26.04 LTS, and our Ubuntu 26.04 LTS install walkthrough covers that path. Read the known issues in the official Ubuntu 26.10 release notes before you wipe a laptop. A few of them hit common hardware: display freezes on some AMD dual-GPU laptops, unstable Wi-Fi on some Intel AX211 cards, and a dead keyboard on some Snapdragon X2 Elite machines.
Check what your machine needs
Canonical raised the desktop minimum to 6 GB of RAM with 26.04 LTS, and the 26.10 release notes don’t list a new figure. Before you start, make sure you can tick these off:
- You have a 64-bit Intel or AMD PC, ideally booting in UEFI mode, or an arm64 or RISC-V machine for those images.
- You have at least 6 GB of RAM and a 2 GHz dual-core processor.
- You have 25 GB of free disk, since a default install used 11 GB of root filesystem for us.
- You have a USB stick of 8 GB or more, because the standard desktop ISO is over 6 GB.
- You’ve backed up anything on the target disk, since the default install erases it.
Our test machine was a Proxmox VM with 4 vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM, a 40 GB disk, UEFI with Secure Boot on and a virtual TPM 2.0. After the first login the desktop sat at about 1.4 GB of RAM in use, so 6 GB leaves you room for a browser and a few apps. A wired connection helps too, because the installer can fetch drivers and updates while it works.
Download the right Ubuntu 26.10 ISO
The part that trips people up is the download folder itself. When we checked on October 19, releases.ubuntu.com/26.10/ still listed the beta ISOs right next to the final ones, and the names only differ by -beta-. Grab the file without it. Canonical also publishes four desktop builds this time, so pick the one that matches your hardware:
| Image | File | Size | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop amd64 | ubuntu-26.10-desktop-amd64.iso | 6.16 GiB | Any 64-bit Intel or AMD PC. The safe default |
| Desktop amd64v3 | ubuntu-26.10-desktop-amd64v3.iso | 5.87 GiB | Your CPU supports x86-64-v3 (AVX2 and friends). Check with the command below, because some newer budget Intel chips still lack it |
| Desktop arm64 | ubuntu-26.10-desktop-arm64.iso | 4.29 GiB | ARM laptops and boards with UEFI |
| Desktop riscv64 | ubuntu-26.10-desktop-riscv64.iso | 3.98 GiB | RISC-V boards such as the SpacemiT K3, or QEMU. The App Center isn’t preinstalled on this image |
| Server amd64 | ubuntu-26.10-live-server-amd64.iso | 2.70 GiB | Headless machines with no desktop |
The standard amd64 desktop image sits on releases.ubuntu.com, while the amd64v3, arm64 and RISC-V builds live on cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/26.10/release/. The v3 image is built for newer CPU instructions, and our guide to Ubuntu’s amd64v3 builds explains the trade in detail. You can stop here and use the standard image if you’re not sure about your CPU. Don’t go by the CPU generation alone, since some recent Pentium, Celeron and Atom parts lack AVX2. An existing Linux system will tell you exactly which levels it supports:
ld.so --help | grep -A3 'glibc-hwcaps'A CPU that can run the v3 image shows x86-64-v3 marked as supported, as ours did:
Subdirectories of glibc-hwcaps directories, in priority order:
x86-64-v4
x86-64-v3 (supported, searched)
x86-64-v2 (supported, searched)Now download the standard desktop ISO and the checksum list that goes with it. Both come from the same folder, so the checksum always matches the build you just fetched:
wget https://releases.ubuntu.com/26.10/ubuntu-26.10-desktop-amd64.iso
wget https://releases.ubuntu.com/26.10/SHA256SUMSCheck the ISO against that list before you write it anywhere. The --ignore-missing flag skips the other images in SHA256SUMS that you didn’t download:
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missingYou should see a single OK line for your file:
ubuntu-26.10-desktop-amd64.iso: OKIf you see FAILED instead, the download was cut short or corrupted, so delete the ISO and fetch it again. A broken image usually boots fine and then fails halfway through the install, which is a much more annoying place to find out.
Write the ISO to a USB drive
On Windows or macOS, a graphical writer such as balenaEtcher or Rufus is the easiest route, and our guide to creating a bootable USB on Linux and macOS walks through the options. If you keep several ISOs around, a Ventoy USB stick lets you copy the file over and boot it straight from the menu. On Linux you can use dd, but find the stick’s device name first, because dd overwrites whatever disk you point it at without asking:
lsblk -d -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,TRANYour stick is the line with usb in the TRAN column and a size that matches it. The examples below assume it’s /dev/sdb, so change that to your own device name. Unmount any partitions your desktop mounted automatically first:
sudo umount /dev/sdb?*An error saying a partition isn’t mounted is fine here. Then write the image:
sudo dd if=ubuntu-26.10-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress oflag=syncWhen the command returns, plug the stick into the target machine and open its boot menu. That’s usually F12, F10 or Esc during power-on, depending on the vendor.
Install Ubuntu 26.10 step by step
The desktop installer moves through a little over a dozen screens. Most of them only need a click on Next, so the sections below spend their time on the few choices you can’t easily undo later: how the disk is used, whether it’s encrypted, and which apps come along.
Boot from the USB stick
Pick the USB stick from your firmware’s boot menu to reach the GRUB menu. Keep Try or Install Ubuntu highlighted and press Enter, or wait for the countdown. Use Ubuntu (safe graphics) only if the screen goes black after this point, which usually means the graphics driver needs the fallback mode.
Secure Boot was switched on in our VM firmware and the ISO booted without any changes, so you don’t need to turn it off on a normal PC either. The live desktop then loads and starts the installer for you, which took a little over a minute on our VM.
Pick your language, accessibility and keyboard
The first screen sets the language for both the installer and the system you’re about to install. Choose yours and click Next.
Accessibility comes next, with seeing, hearing, typing, pointing and zoom options. Everything here is also in the Settings app later, so you can skip it unless you need one of these to finish the install comfortably.
On the keyboard screen, type a few characters into the test field before you move on. A wrong layout here is how people end up with a login password they can’t type, and the test box catches it in five seconds.
If the letters come out wrong, pick another variant from the drop-down, or click Detect and press the keys it asks for.
Connect to the internet
A wired connection is picked for you automatically, and Wi-Fi shows up here on a laptop. You can choose Do not connect to the internet, but then the installer can’t fetch drivers or updates, so your first boot has more catching up to do.
No Wi-Fi option appeared on our VM because it has no wireless card, which is expected.
Choose Install Ubuntu, then Interactive
Try Ubuntu drops you on the live desktop without touching your disk, which is handy for checking Wi-Fi and graphics on a new laptop first. When you’re ready, choose Install Ubuntu.
Keep Interactive installation on the next screen. The two automated options take an autoinstall.yaml file, either one you supply or one served by Canonical’s Landscape, and they’re meant for setting up many identical machines.
You can always come back to autoinstall later, since the same ISO accepts a YAML file on the next machine.
Pick your apps and drivers
Default selection is the minimal set, just as it was on 26.04. Our install came up with Firefox, Files, the App Center, the Ptyxis terminal and a handful of GNOME utilities, but no LibreOffice, Thunderbird or Rhythmbox. If you want an office suite from the first boot, pick Extended selection, which the installer describes as an offline-friendly set of office tools and utilities. Otherwise you can add apps later from the App Center or with apt.
The next screen offers third-party drivers for graphics and Wi-Fi, plus extra media codecs. Tick the first box if you have an NVIDIA card or a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip, because it saves you a driver hunt after the install. In a VM, or on an Intel or AMD laptop, you can leave both unticked.
We left both boxes unticked, and the review screen later lists proprietary software as None.
Choose how to use the disk
Erase disk and install Ubuntu wipes the whole drive and lays out the partitions for you, and it is the right choice for a machine that will only run Ubuntu. If the installer finds another operating system on the disk, it also offers to install Ubuntu alongside it, which is the easy route to dual boot; our blank disk only showed these two choices. Pick Manual installation for a separate /home or a custom layout, and note that the release notes mention new /boot storage requirements in this installer as Ubuntu prepares for a signed GRUB. We used the erase option, and it created its own separate /boot partition, as the review screen shows later.
With the disk choice made, the next screen decides whether that disk is encrypted.
Pick encryption and a file system
This is the screen worth slowing down for. You get three main choices, and opening Advanced options adds three more, for six in total:
- Choose No encryption if the machine never leaves a locked room.
- Choose Encrypt with a passphrase (LVM with LUKS) for any laptop, and type the passphrase at every boot.
- Choose Use hardware-backed encryption only on real hardware with a TPM, where the disk unlocks on its own at startup.
- Under Advanced options, use Use LVM without encryption if you want to resize volumes later.
- Treat both ZFS options as test-only, since the installer itself labels them Experimental.
There’s no Btrfs option on this screen, even though the release notes mention Btrfs resize support in the installer, so a Btrfs root still means going through Manual installation, which we didn’t test. If you go that way, keep /boot on its own ext4 partition: the release notes warn that a future boot loader will drop support for /boot on Btrfs, XFS, ZFS, encrypted /boot and RAID 5 or 6, and such systems might not start after that upgrade. We went with the LUKS passphrase, because it’s what we’d put on a laptop and it works the same in a VM and on bare metal.
“There is an issue with hardware-backed encryption” (RUNNING_IN_VM)
We tried the hardware-backed option first, on a VM with a virtual TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot both turned on. The installer stopped with the message below, and the technical details read RUNNING_IN_VM and “virtual machine environment detected”. If you see this, that’s normal: the check looks at where it’s running, not just at whether a TPM exists, so adding a vTPM doesn’t get you past it.
The screen offers Ignore and continue, with a warning that this “might result in a less secure installation”. We clicked Back instead and picked the passphrase option, because a TPM-sealed disk in a test VM isn’t something we’d rely on. On a real laptop, machines without a hardware root of trust can use this option if you also set a PIN or passphrase on the key, a change the release notes say 26.04.1 received as well. One catch if you’re planning ahead is that systems already using TPM-backed encryption on 26.04 can’t upgrade to 26.10 yet, and the release notes say that upgrade path is expected later in the cycle.
Set the encryption passphrase
Pick a passphrase you can type reliably on a cold boot, and store a copy somewhere other than this computer. It is separate from your login password, and as the warning box says, losing it means losing the data, because there’s no recovery key unless you add one yourself later.
The Next button stays greyed out until both fields match.
Create your account and set the timezone
Type your full name and the installer fills in the computer name and username from it. You can edit both, and each field gets a green tick once it is valid. Leave Require my password to log in on for anything portable. Tick Use Active Directory only if your organisation gave you domain details, because it joins the machine to the domain during the install.
The timezone is guessed from your network location, and it guessed ours correctly. Click the map or type a city if it’s wrong, since this sets the clock your logs and calendar use.
The clock in the top bar switches to the new zone as soon as you click Next, which is a quick way to confirm it took.
Review and start the install
The review screen is your last chance to go back. Scroll down to the partition list and check it carefully. Our encrypted install got a FAT32 EFI partition at /boot/efi, an unencrypted ext4 /boot and an ext4 root inside LUKS and LVM. If the installation disk isn’t the one you expect, click Back now, because Install wipes it straight away.
Once you click Install, a slideshow plays while the system copies files, sets up GRUB and seeds the snaps. Ours went from clicking Install to the finish screen in about nine minutes on NVMe-backed storage. A spinning disk or a busy host takes longer, so leave it alone even if the slideshow looks stuck.
When it’s done, click Restart now and remove the USB stick when you’re asked to.
One small thing happened to us here. The live session hung while shutting down, and nothing on screen changed for several minutes. The install had already finished, so a hard power-off and power-on was safe and booted straight into the new system. If yours hangs at this exact point, you can do the same.
Unlock your disk and log in
With encryption on, the first thing you see after the firmware logo is the passphrase prompt. It names the encrypted volume (dm_crypt-0 on ours) and shows the keyboard layout under the box, which helps if a passphrase that should work keeps failing.
After the unlock, GDM shows your account. Click your name and type the login password, not the disk passphrase.
The first login opens a short setup tour with four pages: the welcome screen, Location Services, Help Improve Ubuntu (both reporting switches start off) and Appearance, where you choose light or dark and an accent colour. The tour doesn’t ask about Ubuntu Pro, and everything here can be changed in Settings later.
Then you’re on the GNOME 51 desktop with the Stonking Stingray wallpaper. The dock only holds what the Default selection installed: Firefox, Files, the App Center and Help.
To confirm the release without a terminal, open Settings, go to System and then About. You’ll see the GNOME Shell version, the operating system name and the running kernel in one place.
The Virtualization row reads KVM because ours is a VM. Scroll down to Hardware Information to see the CPU, memory and graphics the system detected.
Confirm what’s new in Ubuntu 26.10 on your machine
A few commands in the terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+T) show you whether the headline changes really landed on your install. Run them before you copy over old scripts or dotfiles, because two of these changes can break things that worked on 26.04:
lsb_release -ds
uname -r
gnome-shell --version
cp --version | head -1
sudo --version | head -1
systemctl status dbus.service --no-pager | head -2
openssl version
mokutil --sb-stateOn our install they confirmed kernel 7.3, GNOME 51, the uutils cp, dbus-broker behind the dbus.service name, OpenSSL 4 and Secure Boot switched on. Sudo-rs shows up too, though it’s carried over from 26.04 rather than new:
The kernel is worth a second look. The release notes say the 26.10 images ship 7.3.0-9.9, built from the 7.3-rc6 code, because the final upstream 7.3 came out after Ubuntu’s release date. Expect it to move to a later 7.3 build through normal updates. On release week there were no updates waiting for us at all, as apt list --upgradable came back empty.
To put the changes side by side, we read the package versions from the archive on a freshly updated Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS VM and on this 26.10 install on the same day:
| Component | Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS | Ubuntu 26.10 |
|---|---|---|
| Kernel (linux-generic) | 7.0.0-38.38 | 7.3.0-9.9 |
| GNOME Shell | 50.1 | 51.0 |
| systemd | 259.5 | 261.3 |
| OpenSSL | 3.5.5 | 4.0.3 |
| OpenSSH | 10.2p1 | 10.5p1 |
| Mesa (Vulkan drivers) | 26.0.8 | 26.2.4 |
| /usr/bin/cp | GNU (gnucp) | uutils coreutils |
| rust-coreutils | 0.10.0 | 0.12.0 |
| /usr/bin/sudo | sudo-rs 0.2.13 | sudo-rs 0.2.14 |
| System D-Bus | dbus-daemon | dbus-broker |
Two rows matter more than the rest. On 26.04, /usr/bin/cp still pointed at GNU’s copy (gnucp), while on 26.10 cp, mv and rm all point into /usr/lib/cargo/bin/coreutils/, so every core utility you call is now the Rust version. If a script leans on GNU-specific behaviour, test it here first. The GNU binaries are still installed as gnucp, gnumv and so on if you need a quick comparison, and our Rust coreutils guide for Ubuntu covers the differences people hit most.
The second is the message bus. The dbus-daemon package isn’t installed at all on 26.10, and dbus-broker runs both the system bus and each user’s session bus, which most desktop apps never notice. The change you’re more likely to feel is the removal of systemd-sysv-generator: there’s no SysV generator under /usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/ on our install, so an old /etc/init.d script without a proper systemd unit simply won’t start.
OpenSSL 4 also drops the old ENGINE interface, including the pkcs11 engine, in favour of providers. That matters if you sign or connect with a smart card or hardware token through an engine-based config, so check those before you rely on this machine for it. Myna, the speech-to-text preview from Canonical’s announcement, isn’t preinstalled. Canonical ships the preview through the ppa:canonical-desktop-team/myna PPA as the myna-config package, which already had a 26.10 build when we checked, and its preview announcement has the setup steps. Ignore the snap called myna in the Snap Store, which comes from an individual publisher rather than Canonical.
See what a fresh install uses
These numbers come from the VM right after the first login, with the Default app selection and LUKS on LVM. They give you a baseline to compare your own machine against:
| Measurement | Result | How we read it |
|---|---|---|
| Time to install | About 9 minutes | From clicking Install to the finish screen |
| Root filesystem used | 11 GB of 37 GB | df -h / |
| /boot used | 81 MB of 2.0 GB | df -h /boot |
| Debian packages | 1,495 | dpkg -l | grep -c ^ii |
| Snaps | 13, including Firefox and the App Center | snap list |
| RAM in use after login | 1,460 MiB of 7,401 MiB | free -m |
| Swap | 4 GB swap file, unused | free -m |
| Boot, kernel and userspace | 0.9 s and 22.5 s | systemd-analyze |
Leave the initrd figure out when you compare boot times on an encrypted install. systemd-analyze reported 29.9 seconds for it on ours. The journal shows systemd-cryptsetup waiting at the passphrase prompt for 26 of those seconds, so the figure measures how fast you type, not how fast the machine is. The 22.5 seconds of userspace is the part a faster disk or fewer startup services can actually shrink.
Common questions about Ubuntu 26.10
How long is Ubuntu 26.10 supported?
Ubuntu 26.10 is supported for nine months, until July 2027. The /usr/share/distro-info/ubuntu.csv file on the installed system puts the exact end date at 2027-07-15, so plan to upgrade to 27.04 before then.
Can I upgrade from Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to 26.10?
Yes, but a default 26.04 install won’t offer it, because LTS releases ship with Prompt=lts and only look for the next LTS. Switch that setting to normal first, either in Software & Updates under Updates (“Notify me of a new Ubuntu version: For any new version”) or in the file itself:
sudo sed -i 's/^Prompt=.*/Prompt=normal/' /etc/update-manager/release-upgradesThen sudo do-release-upgrade picks up 26.10 once Canonical adds it to the main meta-release feed. When we checked on October 19, that feed still ended at 26.04.1 LTS and 26.10 was only in the development feed, so the upgrade wasn’t on offer yet. Machines using TPM-backed disk encryption are blocked from this upgrade at release either way, and our 24.04 to 26.04 upgrade guide covers the backup and cleanup steps worth doing before any release upgrade.
Does hardware-backed encryption work in a virtual machine?
Not without overriding a warning. Our VM had a virtual TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, and the installer still flagged RUNNING_IN_VM. Use the LUKS passphrase option in VMs, and save hardware-backed encryption for a real laptop or desktop.
Where did LibreOffice and Thunderbird go?
They aren’t part of the Default selection, the same as on 26.04, so a fresh install doesn’t include them. Pick Extended selection in the installer, or add them afterwards from the App Center. If you’re settling in for the long run, our list of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS features is a good refresher on what 26.10 builds on.
