Installing the Ubuntu desktop on RISC-V hardware is made easier with 26.10, as Canonical is now building official riscv64 desktop images.
Experimental versions of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release are out for testing on a SpacemiT K3 – the board Canonical has been working on with SpacemiT. One ISO ships the standard GNOME desktop, and the other is built around Xubuntu minimal.
Canonical’s Valentin Haudiquet says both of the ISOs are “experimental” and “carry no official support” yet. They won’t work flawlessly and do contain some issues hat be addressed in the ‘final’ versions that arrives on 15 October 2026.
Why are there two images?
RISC-V hardware that meets the RVA23 baseline is still fairly new. Many software developers who want to test RISC-V but lack the hardware use QEMU – where the GNOME desktop can take up to 30 minutes to load, hence a lighter, quicker option.
On real hardware, the GNOME image is said to provide “a nice performant desktop experience”, and with recent jumps in RISC-V hardware capabilities, that’s good to hear.
Canonical’s work to add RISC-V support to Flutter was part of the effort to get here, as many Ubuntu apps, including the OS installer, use it. A few desktop snaps aren’t yet RISC-V ready, including the App Center.
Changes to livecd-rootfs were needed to handle device trees and Ubuntu’s build pipeline needed to be able generate the new ricv64 ISOs.
But weren’t RISC-V tablets sold with Ubuntu on?
This isn’t the first time Ubuntu has had installers for RISC-V, as server images have been available for years on which a GUI desktop could be installed (long before Canonical raised the ISA profile to RVA23 to only support newer, performant boards).
But official installation images with a desktop preinstalled weren’t provided from Canonical.
Companies that’ve worked with Canonical on Ubuntu RISC-V support, many of which have sold RISC-V tablets, laptops and single-board computers with Ubuntu preinstalled, have often had to build and host their own recovery images.
This news resolves that: official desktop images for modern 64-bit RISC-V (RVA23+) hardware, available to download from the same place as the Intel/AMD and Arm64 ones.
Prefer an LTS? An Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS riscv64 desktop ISO is also available, albeit without support for the K3 (Haudiquet says that is coming soon, though).
You can download the test image of Ubuntu 26.10 desktop (RISC-V) image from the daily builds folder on cdimage.ubuntu.com, with the Xubuntu 26.10 (RISC-V) image is in the Xubuntu daily builds folder.