The second monthly snapshot of Ubuntu Questing Quokka (which will formally become Ubuntu 25.10 when released on October 9 2025) is now available for testing.
Last month Canonical’s engineers announced plans to change development builds building through greater automated testing and build reproducibility, creating new OS images faster and ‘with little to no human intervention.’
It’s a passive-sounding approach that is technically pragmatic.
New build systems processes and workflow integrations that are transparent, amendable and auditable could mean volunteers spend less time doing menial checks and more time building new things.
It also may mean that major issues that might prove “blockers” to release get found much sooner in the. development cycle. Prior, big issues only tend to be uncovered in the later beta stages of testing when more community volunteers feel comfortable to start testing.
Even so, it’s early days for the new approach. For now, it’s making snapshots and these not production ready. They are not betas. They are not more stable than a regular daily build — and they’re certainly not rolling releases, as some assume!
As Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta puts it in a mail blast to the Ubuntu Devel mailing list: “We’d like to remind you that these aren’t production ready and should be seen as “throwaway artifacts” for now” (sic).
In a sense, the Ubuntu monthly snapshots are as much about letting distro engineers test, assess and fine-tune the infrastructure backend to produce working OS images as it is about producing a build to test, assess and fine-tine the OS itself.
Or as I originally wrote that sentence: you won’t know if your new automated processes are producing working builds until your new automated processes are producing builds people can say are working ;) 1.
Download Ubuntu Snapshots
You can download Ubuntu 25.10 Snapshots from the Ubuntu CD image server. Both the standard GNOME-toting version as well as all official Ubuntu flavours provide snapshots.
Ubuntu 25.10 is under active development with many bigger changes and upgrades yet to come. Ergo, if you download it to test, temper yourself: changes to date are more low-level than user-facing, like Chrony with NTS, new Rust-based sudo and no Xorg session.
Ubuntu 25.10 Snapshot 3 will be released on July 31 2025. If you install this snapshot you can just run install software updates as/when they come to stay up to date (you won’t need to reinstall using Snapshot 3 to get anything new, per se).
The final stable release of Ubuntu 25.10 is out on Thursday, October 9 2025.
- I got an e-mail a few weeks back asked why I sometimes put “(sic)” after a quote. It’s used to indicate that typos, errors or unconventional punctuation in the quote are “thus”, i.e., not my typo (for once) and I haven’t corrected it. Sic is a latin word but I backronym it to stand for “said in context”, which can help in remembering the purpose of sic when seen in situ. ↩︎