Ubuntu’s ‘Questing Quokka’ journey to release land, and it seems it’s off with fresh provisions – devs just announced plans to ship a pair of new apps in the 25.10 release out October.
Loupe will replace Eye of GNOME as the default image viewer in Ubuntu 25.10, while Ptyxis supplants GNOME Terminal as default terminal emulator.
Neither software swap is a surprise, though the nature of development is such that the changes may be waylaid by reality should testing reveal issues, incompatibilities, and inconsistencies which require a rethink on these replacements.
However, it’s likely both apps will ship in the final, stable release of Ubuntu 25.10 on October 9, 2025.
Ubuntu developers had previously signposted plans to ship these apps by default, having referring to Ptyxis as its ‘recommended replacement’ for GNOME Terminal during the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle.
Can these newcomers match the popularity of their predecessors?
Loupe Image Viewer
I’ve written about Loupe, a GNOME Core app, a few times. It’s a GPU-accelerated image viewer built in Rust and GTK4/libadwaita, and uses Glycin for loading images (and image metadata). It also offers basic image editing capabilities, like crop, rotate and flip.
Loupe‘s minimal UI allows the image being viewed to be the prime focal point. On-canvas controls let you page between images and zoom in/out on an image. It’s also touch-gesture friendly, with fluid animations if using touchpad or touchscreen.
If you’re interested in eyeing up Loupe’s feature-set first hand, you can install it on Ubuntu from the repos on Ubuntu 24.10 and above: run sudo apt install loupe to get it, or looping in the latest release from Flathub.
Ptyxis Terminal Emulator
According to Ubuntu’s Jean Baptiste Lallement, Ubuntu Desktop team member at Canonical, the distro is also replacing GNOME Terminal with Ptyxis in Ubuntu 25.10.
Ptyxis is billed as a “terminal for a container-oriented desktop”, allowing users to easily save and access container setups with support for Podman, Toolbox, and Distrobox listed on its Flathub store page.
It’s leveraging the GTK4 VTE library (this GPU-accelerated) wrapped in a modern GTK4/libadwaita UI (with the niceties this affords, like accent colour integration, keyboard shortcuts, and a slick zooming tab overview).
Beyond that, it has a stack of additional features that are sure to appeal to all kinds of terminal addicts, not just those who routinely work with containers on the Linux desktop:
- Pinned tabs and saved sessions
- Colour palettes (bundled and user-installable)
- Profiles with container integration
- Foreground process tracking e.g., sudo, SSH
- Transparent terminal background support
- Separate process mode for terminal-based apps
- Configurable keyboard shortcuts
- Tabs are run within separate cgroups
- Terminal inspector
Interestingly, the creator of Ptyxis, GNOME developer Christian Hergert, notes his app is “probably not the fastest thing out there, but it should be close enough that other features are of more value.”
Looking at that list, he’s not wrong!
If you’re interested in playing around with Ptyxis’ plethora of features for yourself, you can install it on Ubuntu 24.10 and above from the repos by running sudo apt install ptyxis, or getting the latest release from Flathub.
What’s next?
There are plenty of other changes planned for Ubuntu 25.10, including the obvious stuff (GNOME 49, new Linux kernel, updated graphics, etc) and the expected stuff (prompting client graduating from experimental, Landscape integration in the installer).
Chances are Ubuntu devs may push for a few additional changes as-yet unknown in this release given it’s the final release before the next LTS (out in April 2026) and LTS cycles tend to focus on stability as core features.