The title says that because, until now, the core utilities in Ubuntu were not fully Rust. cp, mv, and rm had stayed on the GNU versions over compatibility issues. They have since moved to the Rust-based uutils implementation, taking the distro even further in its oxidation process.
Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed “Stonking Stingray”, is an interim release, which means it brings newer software than the earlier LTS while only getting nine months of support, ending in July 2027.
Although our features roundup covered a lot of ground, there were some changes that it missed.
Ubuntu 26.10: What’s New?
Well, we start with the kernel powering this interim release, Linux 7.3, which offers support for recent Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops along with several older Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus machines from Lenovo, HP, and Acer.
Gamers will be glad to know that the first chunk of Valve engineer Natalie Vock’s VRAM overcommit work has also landed in this kernel. Games on graphics cards with too little video memory should run better, as some of the data can now be offloaded to regular system RAM.
You already know that this Linux release is shaping up to be one of the most performance-focused releases in years.
Ubuntu is also moving to the NVIDIA 615 driver series, which replaces 595 and 610 and ships open kernel modules only, supporting Turing and newer GPUs.
The rustification we talked about earlier also extends to OpenPGP, where Sequoia PGP, a Rust-based implementation built by former GnuPG developers, has landed in the main archive. Its sq and sqv tools now sit alongside GnuPG’s gpg and gpgv.
For the desktop environment, Ubuntu 26.10 has GNOME 51, with its range of upgrades such as a fingerprint manager in the Users panel, DNS search domains in the Network settings, and a count badge in Files when you drag multiple items.
There’s also the Ubuntu Tiling Assistant that shows a Windows-11-like interface for the built-in snappable window layouts.
If you were hoping for a redesigned installer and first-boot onboarding flow, those are planned to come for the next long-term support release, Ubuntu 28.04 LTS.
Other Changes & Improvements
These are some of the other notable changes in this release:
OpenSSL 4 brings Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) and better QUIC support.
TPM-backed full-disk encryption now works without a hardware root of trust if a PIN or passphrase is set.
The RISC-V platform gets official RVA23 support for the SpacemiT K3 boards and SiFive's BigSky platform.
Twelve new wallpapers that were picked across the Mascot, Photography, and Digital/Abstract categories.
The toolchain upgrades consist of GCC 15.2.0, LLVM 22.1.8, Python 3.14.7, Rust 1.97.1, Go 1.27, and OpenJDK 25.0.4.
Download Ubuntu 26.10
ISOs for this interim release are available for AMD64, ARM64, RISC-V, and others from the official website; go for the “Desktop” ISOs if you are a regular user. Specific flavors like Server, Netboot, and WSL can be fetched from the releases portal.
My question would be why does dpkg need to except anything? Why do they depend on coreutils at all?
It’s not that they depend on coreutils, it’s that without coreutils, the operating system no longer has the tools to (for example) navigate and make changes to the file system.
No, the kernel does that. Coreutils are the tools for the user to do that through the terminal, and for shell scripts that can’t make kernel calls (because they’re scripts).
(Fun fact: you can absolutely call that kernel function I just linked to in a super unsafe way in C, leading to a vulnerable tool whose only job is to read a directory, like ls.)
Fair point. dpkg, being effectively some scripts, suddenly lose access to user-level utilities for managing files in the filesystem, like mv, mkdir, cp, ln, etc.
dpkg is mostly written in C and Perl. It is not “effectively some scripts”. I feel like you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
My bad, I was just trying to meet you halfway and not suggest that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about, because that would be rude.
I don’t really care what dpkg is written in but I do know two things for a fact: Ubuntu’s coreutils upgrade broke Ubuntu because coreutils first gets removed, and Canonical’s official response was “apt maintainers will have to clean up our mess”: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/migration-to-rust-coreutils-in-25-10/59708
My memory was wrong on one point: dpkg is the workaround, apt is what the linked post blames.
I read through that whole discussion. None of it seems unreasonable. Considering Debian also wants apt to support replacing coreutils too, I don’t even know why you think it’s unreasonable. There is limiting behavior in apt, and both the Debian and the Ubuntu devs want it fixed. It’s a win-win.