The third, and potentially final, monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 is available for download.
There were no monthly snapshots of the ‘Stonking Stingray’ in August or July – no reason has been given – and the Ubuntu 26.10 beta release is scheduled for release on 24 September.
Thus, this could be the final snapshot of the, though Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta says that a “surprise snapshot to test some changes to our machinery” might appear.
Ubuntu’s monthly snapshots are strictly for testing. They aren’t alpha builds and they aren’t production ready. The team say to view them as “throwaway artifacts”. Their role, since they were introduced in 2025, is to help Canonical test and iterate on a new build system.
And, well, they also act as an series of unofficial soft-target deadlines for the distro’s engineers to land features they want more people to test.
For most of us, it’s better to test Ubuntu 26.10 using the most recent successful daily build, rather than one of the monthly snapshots for the simple that the snapshots are a snapshot; they go stale sooner.
Since the last snapshot in June plenty of package updates have landed, including key parts of the upcoming GNOME 51 release is present, including new versions of default apps like Papers (gained visual signatures) and Loupe (shows software, lens and other metadata).
And the snapshot is powered by the Linux 7.2 kernel, which was released in August.
You won’t find Ubuntu’s new AI-powered speech-to-text feature, Myna, here. I shared a video demo of Ubuntu’s speech-to-text tech last week, but it’s not included in this snapshot nor the daily builds.
But unless you’re a developer or a hardened bug hunter, there’s little reason to strike out on the Stonking Stingray yet – not with the official Ubuntu 26.10 beta only a few weeks away.
Download Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 3 from the official cdimage server, which also offers new snapshots for Ubuntu 26.10 flavours, spins and hardware variants, including Raspberry Pi and Arm64.