Ubuntu 26.10 'Stonking Stingray' Snapshot 4 Ships Ahead of Next Week's Beta
Canonical's fourth and final monthly preview lands September 17, closely mirroring the beta that drops next week.
Canonical just released Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" Snapshot 4, the fourth and final monthly development snapshot ahead of the stable interim release due October 15. Images hit the servers on September 17 and, as always, are the kind of artifact Canonical wants you to treat as throwaway.
This is the second monthly snapshot in September alone. Snapshot 3 landed earlier this month, and now we're on Snapshot 4. Normally these previews move at a calmer clip, so the double dose isn't accidental. Canonical says Snapshot 4 exists to mirror what the beta will look like next week.
"These should be very close to what the Beta candidates will look like next week," release engineer Utkarsh Gupta ("utkarsh") wrote in the announcement on both the ubuntu-devel mailing list and the Ubuntu Community Hub. "So don't shy away from testing them and making sure you're ready for the Stonking Beta on September 24th."
What's in Snapshot 4
Snapshot 4 sits remarkably close to the upcoming beta. It carries a big pile of updates over the 26.04 LTS base if you care about the specifics.
Under the hood you'll find Linux 7.2, GNOME 51, and Mesa 26.2 graphics drivers. The change getting the most attention is the completed transition to Rust-based coreutils. cp, mv, and rm are all rewritten in Rust now, wrapping up Ubuntu's multi-year "Rustification" of base system utilities. It mostly matters for Canonical's roadmap, though there's a quiet efficiency angle: rewritten C utilities can shave compile time and memory use on capable machines.
There's also a new experimental piece this cycle. Ubuntu is shipping Amd64-v3 builds, an x86-64-v3 package archive aimed at newer Intel and AMD CPUs. The goal is performance gains on hardware that can run the newer instruction set, which matters most on budget and low-end systems. If your CPU doesn't support v3, you're not missing anything. Just skip that build.
Snapshots get published for all the usual flavors. That's Ubuntu Desktop and Server, plus Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Unity, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu MATE. The Raspberry Pi, Arm64, and Amd64-v3 variants round it out.
Here's the part worth flagging. The final 26.10 won't track Linux 7.2. Canonical's policy since 2024 is to ship whatever upstream kernel is newest at freeze time, so the real build will follow Linux 7.3, which ships in the second half of October. This snapshot policy was extended in 2025 to track interim kernels through the monthly previews, which buys better test coverage before the actual freeze.
Keep in mind these are throwaway artifacts. Canonical is explicit about not installing Snapshot 4 on a production machine. If you want something a bit fresher between snapshots, daily builds also exist. They're equally pre-release, so the same caution applies.
The bigger picture for 26.10
Snapshot 4 is just one checkpoint in a cycle full of changes. Some of the most notable features heading toward 26.10 aren't even finished yet.
Canonical is redesigning the installer and onboarding flow, aiming to cut down partitioning and storage complexity. Safe defaults, guided workflows, advanced options hidden behind a button. The catch is that this work is explicitly aimed at the next LTS, 28.04. The design happens during the 26.10 cycle though, so it's shaping up right now.
There's plenty else on the table: an on-device AI effort called "Myna" that runs models entirely on your machine, a package-agnostic App Center that handles both snaps and DEBs, and a switch to dbus-broker to replace the long-running dbus-daemon that has shipped since Ubuntu's 2004 debut.
I'll be honest that some of these feel more like roadmap theater than things you'll notice tomorrow. The D-Bus switch is a solid engineering upgrade but unlikely to make headlines. The RISC-V desktop push and the new Ubuntu Certified Check are the ones that matter to a real slice of users, and the Microsoft auth support via authd is a practical nod to enterprise setups.
Then there's the continued Rustification. Beyond coreutils, Ubuntu has rewritten findutils, diffutils, and sudo, with sudo-rs becoming the default back in 25.10. Ntpd-rs is next but won't take over until Ubuntu 27.04. Canonical's also thrown in a Gold Sponsorship of the Trifecta Tech Foundation at €40,000 a year.
New wallpapers round out the package. Twelve were picked from a community competition across Mascot, Photography, and Digital/Abstract categories, and they feature the stingray mascot. On top of that there's a push toward WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility, hwctl moving to a Snap, and a proposed GRUB overhaul that would strip signed GRUB builds down to bare essentials for Secure Boot. That last one drops Btrfs and ZFS support in the installer process, which is worth watching if you run either.
The 26.10 schedule is tight but clear. The kernel freezes October 1, the release candidate and final freeze lands October 8, and the stable interim release hits October 15. Support runs about nine months for an interim release, so expect it to close around July 2027.
That's the whole logic of the cycle. 26.10 sits between the 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon" and the next LTS, 28.04, letting Canonical test newer kernels, toolchains, and desktop changes against a smaller audience before they're baked into the next long-term track.
Want to try it? Head here to download the release and here to read Gupta's full announcement if you want the full picture on the beta-testing angle.
