New terminal and image viewer apps are included in the latest development builds of Ubuntu 25.10, along with a much-hyped switch to Rust-based sudo and, less-hyped, the arrival of new Ubuntu Insights and hwctl packages.
Not that most of this is news to regular readers.
At the start of the ‘questing’ cycle, developers working on Ubuntu announced plans to ship Ptyxis and Loupe as default terminal emulator and image viewer respectively.
Both are solid replacements to GNOME Terminal and Eye of GNOME, designed to advantage of new technologies and libraries, and do things the old ones couldn’t.
Under the hood, Ubuntu 25.10’s switch to sudo-rs is designed to bolster the distro’s security thanks to Rust’s inherent memory safety features. While sudo-rs is not a 1:1 replacement for the old sudo — and isn’t designed to be — users shouldn’t notice any change.
Ubuntu Insights supplants Ubuntu Report for “transparent, consent-based non-PII system info and metrics collection”, with greater scope for expanding its functionality down the line. Getting this in now, ahead of the next LTS, is important – same with hwctrl.
But if you downloaded one of the new Ubuntu 25.10 monthly snapshots or an older daily build, you wouldn’t have found the new apps and tools included, and might’ve wondered if Ubuntu had abandoned plans to switch — thankfully not.
It’s simple that making changes to ‘seeded’ software can’t happen idly.
Default apps and any critical dependencies they use need to moved to the main repository to be part of the default seed. All packages in main receive greater support commitments from Canonical, so anything added has to be checked and vetted – that takes time.
Hurdles cleared, Ubuntu 25.10’s new apps are baked in to the latest daily builds.
Anyone currently testing Ubuntu 25.10 — hopefully on a non-critical device or in the safety of a virtual machine — will receive the new apps through regular software updates, no need to do anything special to get them.
For those who upgrade to Ubuntu 25.10 from Ubuntu 25.04 in October, it’s not clear if GNOME Terminal or Eye of GNOME will be automatically removed after these replacements are installed. Generally, Ubuntu does not do that, and keeps both around.
For those testing daily builds, both apps currently use their Adwaita icons, not their predecessor’s Yaru ones. As UI freeze isn’t in effect for Ubuntu 25.10 yet — the big Yaru theme drop yet to come — the apps will gain rightful glyph coverage soon.