LONDON, October 10 — Canonical has pushed the beta of Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed “Stonking Stingray,” to testers with a release date now set for October 15, a week later than originally planned. The delay gives engineers more runway to smooth out the rough edges that come with a desktop stack built around GNOME 51, which only reached its final “A Coruña” release in recent days.
Rust reaches deeper into the system
The beta continues Canonical’s quiet oxidation of the userland. Core Unix utilities are being swapped for Rust implementations, and the stock OpenPGP stack now rides on Sequoia-PGP, a Rust-native library that replaces the long-standing GnuPG backend. For developers and privacy-conscious users across the region, the shift means memory-safe cryptography without changing a single command-line habit.
Canonical’s new Myna speech-to-text tool lands as an optional component, powered by a local large-language model and offering a choice of recognition models. No audio leaves the machine unless the user opts in, a design choice that resonates with communities wary of cloud-dependent assistants.
The feature is still early, but it signals a future where voice control works offline on modest hardware — closer to home for families across the region who rely on older laptops. The desktop itself is a mixed bag. On the plus side, GNOME 51 runs smoothly even on ancient, long-unsupported NVIDIA GPUs, a win for anyone stretching hardware life in schools, internet cafés, or home offices.
The installer borrowed from the 2024 LTS works reliably, pulls updates during setup so the first post-install refresh is nearly instant, and drops support for the obsolete WEP Wi-Fi standard — a sensible cleanup. But the beta isn’t seamless.
A persistent cosmetic bug leaves some application icons missing their themes, an echo of what Alpine Linux 3.16 faced four years ago. The installer window also refuses to resize, and it ignored a manually selected dedicated swap partition during testing. Fedora’s Workstation edition shares the same GNOME 51 base, so both distributions will feel the ripple of these upstream quirks.
What to watch
The final release on October 15 will show whether Canonical can iron out the theme regression and the swap-partition oversight before the ISO ships. For now, testers across Asia and beyond are filing bugs, swapping workarounds, and reminding each other that a beta is exactly the place to catch these things — together.
