Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" Enters Feature Freeze
Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" officially crossed the feature freeze line on August 20. From this point forward, Canonical's release team is shutting the door on new functionality and turning its attention entirely to polishing bugs. The final build is still targeting an October 15 launch.
The milestone was announced on the Ubuntu mailing list by Paride Legovini on behalf of the Release Team. The directive was straightforward: "Ideally, you should all now be focusing on bug fixing rather than getting new features into the release." It's a necessary phase, though it does mean the feature set is locked in for the roughly nine months of support this interim release will get before its end of life in July 2027.
Keep in mind that the nine-month window is measured from the final launch date, not the August cutoff. The current LTS, Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon," will stick around until May 2031 with extended security maintenance stretching into 2041. Stonking Stingray was never built for that kind of shelf life. It was built to ship the latest packages while the LTS does the heavy lifting on production servers.
What's Locked In
Since feature freeze freezes the package list, Stonking Stingray will ship with whatever landed in the archive by that cutoff. That includes Glibc 2.44, which merged into the development branch on August 6, and the default transition to LLVM as the system compiler. The GNOME desktop stack remains the same as what shipped in last year's "Questing Quokka," while the kernel series will continue receiving bug patches through the rest of the freeze period.
Canonical does allow upstream version bumps if they don't introduce new features, but any quilt patch adding functionality still requires a formal exception request. The release team reviews those filings within a week of the cutoff, and the documentation is publicly available if you want to read the fine print.
Ubuntu's six-month rhythm has been reliable enough to build infrastructure around. April brings the long-term support releases, supported for five years standard and five more under extended maintenance. October delivers the interim drops. Stonking Stingray falls squarely in the second camp. Users who need stability beyond the standard window will want to either stick with 26.04 LTS or wait until the next long-term release lands in April 2028.
The path from here to launch includes a UI freeze on September 10, a beta release on September 24, and a final freeze alongside the release candidate on October 8. Documentation and kernel freezes round out the final stretch. The bug reports will keep rolling in, and the build servers will keep grinding until the final ISO ships.
Head here to the official release notes and freeze exception policy to track exactly which cutoff rules apply to your build.
