Ubuntu 26.10 flavours bring plenty of changes
by by Joey Sneddon · omg! ubuntu · JoinAlongside the main edition, Ubuntu 26.10 brought new releases of community flavours, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu and a welcome return of Ubuntu MATE.
All of Ubuntu’s official flavours share the same foundations as the main release, with the Linux 7.3 kernel, Mesa 26.2 graphics drivers, updated tooling and support for installing snap packages from the Snap Store.
Read on for an overview of the key changes in some of the most popular Ubuntu flavours, and downloads links to grab an ISO if you feel like sampling one them first-hand.
Ubuntu 26.10 Flavour Recap
Xubuntu 26.10
Xubuntu 26.10 ships with Xfce 4.20, which gets bug fixes to improve stability and the burgeoning Wayland support (“for those adventurous enough to use it”, quip the team).
The Ristretto image viewer gains an option to shuffle images, improves printing and can open images from from web links. Xfce Terminal lowers its CPU usage and adds an option to turn off URL highlighting.
Screenshooter, the stock screenshot tool, can now take region and fullscreen screenshots on Wayland and removes its Imgur upload option. Catfish searches now start in the active folder. App updates loop in GIMP 3.2.6 for graphics work.
More details on the changes in the official Xubuntu 26.10 release notes.
Ubuntu Kylin 26.10
Ubuntu Kylin 26.10 is largely a bug fix and package bump release, with no major user-facing changes. The Windows 7-style UKUI desktop environment is the same version included in the April release of 26.04.
There is, however, an eye-catching (AI generated) desktop wallpaper. It reworks Ubuntu’s official release mascot artwork1 (a stingray) in a fluid ‘glassmorphism’ style with iridescent pastel colour gradients.
Ubuntu Kylin 26.04’s background reinterpreted the mascot art (memorably, a photograph of a raccoon-shaped island surrounded by sea with upside-down seagulls flying over it), so I’m hoping this becomes a new tradition.
Kubuntu 26.10
The Kubuntu 26.10 release announcement says it offers “the latest KDE Plasma2“. It actually comes with Plasma 6.7 not the newly-launched Plasma 6.8, but it’s still one version newer than what’s on the Kubuntu 26.04 release.
Multi-monitor users can now assigned virtual desktops to specific displays, and switch between them more easily with new keyboard shortcuts.
Other changes include theme and dark mode switching bugs, a glide effect on desktop notifications, timezone offset labels show in the Digital Clock widget and an option to enable type-ahead searching on the desktop.
As in its 26.04 release, a Plasma X11 desktop session not included, but can be installed manually. It will be the final release where that’s possible as Plasma 6.8 has dropped the plasma-session-x11 entirely.
Ubuntu MATE 26.10
Ubuntu MATE is back with its 26.10 release, the first to be put out under its new maintainers. Not every MATE package has been updated to its newest upstream version, but what ones are included are said to be stable and offer bug fixes.
The flavour skipped the 26.04 LTS earlier this year. The release notes say this is the first release to incorporate Ubuntu’s switch to Dracut. It also drops gdei and sees ifupdown replaced with netplan.
Getting the flavour back on its feet under a new team was never going to be an overnight thing. While a fair number of ‘known issues’ are listed in this release (broken RedShift, missing icons, VM quirks), it’s good to see it back.
Download Ubuntu MATE 26.10
Lubuntu 26.10
Lubuntu 26.10 ships with the LXQt 2.4.0 desktop, described upstream as “mostly bugfixes and code cleanup”, but with minor improvements, like a horizontal layout for the sound applet and transient notifications no long linger.
X11 is still the default desktop session in Lubuntu 26.10 but a Wayland session is included and available to select the login screen, based on Miriway.
Ubuntu Studio
Ubuntu Studio 26.10 continues to cater to creatives of all types, but musicians will find more audio apps available to them, including Sonic Pi live-coding environment and SuperCollider for ‘algorithmic’ compositions.
A command-line white-noise generator, jnoise, is also available. Many other audio tools have been updated, as have a slew of other software, including newer versions of OBS Studio, GIMP, Ardour, Krita and Kdenlive.
The Ubuntu Studio installer now allows individual packages to be picked from meta packages, and the UI of the flavour’s audio configuration wizard has been streamlined.
Download Ubuntu Studio 26.10
Other flavours
Other flavours are taking part. Edubuntu 26.10 lets administrators pick individual packages from age-group software sets at install time and updates its Paperboy news reader for media literacy lessons in secondary and tertiary education.
Ubuntu Budgie 26.10 adds a new widget for finding and playing internet radio stations and supports automatic day/night wallpapers, while Ubuntu Cinnamon 26.10 updates its desktop to Cinnamon 6.6.9.
- As in, the same stingray shape from the official mascot artwork. Other flavours include wallpapers with stingrays on, in varying designs and styles. ↩︎
- https://web.archive.org/web/20261015225700/https://kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-26-10-release-notes/ ↩︎