Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed ‘Stonking Stingray’, entered feature freeze on 20 August – though the formal announcement arrive later than usual.
From this point onwards, development focus shifts from landing major changes to improving them, along with the rest of the package set, ahead of the final, stable Ubuntu 26.10 release in October.
“Ideally, you should all now be focusing on bug fixing rather than getting new features into the release”, said Paride Legovini, engineer at Canonical, in a post on the Ubuntu developer mailing list on 24 August, 2026.
However, the final makeup of Ubuntu 26.10 – set to offer GNOME 51, more Rust tooling and GPU driver management in App Center among its many changes – is not a done deal quite yet.
Major package updates can still make it in to the final release, but developers will have to apply for a Feature Freeze Exception (FFE) – and have it granted – to land them, per Ubuntu’s usual release process.
Any major changes in packages uploaded to the stonking archives prior to the freeze deadline, but caught in the proposed queue, will make it in.
Package uploads that don’t add new features, only bug fixes, won’t require a FFe, even for a big version bump – feature freeze is, as the name implies, about features.
More user-facing changes are still to come as wallpapers, Yaru theme work and other visual tweaks are due before the User-Interface Freeze on 10 September. Again, like here, exceptions can be request if needed.
As for kernel choice, the Linux 7.2 release arrived earlier than expected. Canonical had said it would target the v7.2 kernel but, now, there’s a chance Ubuntu 26.10 will ship on Linux 7.3 – even if that version is still at release candidate status in October.
Ubuntu 26.10 is due for release on 15 October, 2026, but there’ll be a beta release on 24 September for those wanting to sample the Stonking Stingray’s change-set sooner.