15th October is when it swims ashore

Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) release date & schedule

Grab your diary and jot down the date, as Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’ is going to be released on 15 October, 2026.

The Ubuntu 26.10 release date and those of other notable milestones in the next development cycle have now been shared by Canonical but, given the nature of development, should be considered tentative – plans can and do change.

The most significant date in the 26.10 schedule, besides the final release, is that of feature freeze on August 10, 2026. This is the date at which (in theory¹) new features stop being added so that the focus can move to bug fixing and cleanups.

That’s the date by which the character of the Stonking Stingray will reveal itself, while UI freeze a month later is when the personality becomes apparent, i.e., when any new artwork, theme changes and user-facing adjustments need to be in place.

As an interim release, Ubuntu 26.10 will get 9 month of updates, which has a 3 month overlap with the following release, Ubuntu 27.04 (all these numbers look so wrong; it feels like only yesterday I was weirded out by double digits at the front).

We’ll learn more about Canonical’s plans in the coming months as Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has only just been released and the stonking archives are yet be opened.

The only other version of Ubuntu to be released on October 15th was Ubuntu 18.10, notable for being the first release to use the Yaru GTK and icon theme.

The first follow-on release is often more interesting as developers can land bigger changes that might have proven too disruptive and controversial to debut in a release that requires a long-term support commitment.

There are givens for 26.10, like the GNOME 51 desktop and either Linux 7.2 or 7.3 kernel versions (schedules depending). A no-frills GRUB boot loader is also in the offing as a means to hardening distro security on encrypted installs.

Are there any big changes or features you want to see Ubuntu’s engineering and software development teams focus on in 26.10? If so, share them down in the comments.

1. Feature Freeze Exceptions have to be requested and granted for changes that missed this cut off to make it in to the archive (repos) and on to the image itself. ↩︎