Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" enters final freeze, eyes October 15 launch
Canonical's release team says the interim Linux release is heading for next week.
Ubuntu 26.10 has crossed into final freeze. As of Thursday, Canonical's release team will only accept release-critical fixes and SRU-appropriate patches, and it's pointed straight at an October 15 go-live date. The interim release, internally known as "Stonking Stingray," is just past the closing gate.
Utkarsh Gupta of Canonical posted the announcement Thursday on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list, writing on behalf of the release team. The message spelled out exactly what would and wouldn't get merged in the final days.
"The current uploads in the queue will be reviewed and either accepted or rejected as appropriate by pre-freeze standards," Gupta wrote. New uploads now have to land in one of two buckets: release-critical bugs that break images or installers, or fixes that would suit post-release stable updates.
That's a firmer gate than earlier stages. From the moment the freeze closed, every upload has to reference a Launchpad bug report in its changelog. If a fix belongs in a Stable Release Update, the team would rather it ride the formal SRU track instead of piling onto a frozen image.
The team will also kill its automated cron jobs and spin up final release candidate images over the next few days. Community testers across Ubuntu's many spins are being invited in, with an explicit hope for "another uneventful release next week." As Gupta put it, "Last minute panic is never fun."
Behind the rebuild
The freeze didn't arrive out of nowhere. Six days earlier, on October 6, developer Graham Inggs flagged that a second full test rebuild was underway. That rebuild actually kicked off on October 2 across every architecture and component in the archive.
Full rebuilds are the project's way of verifying that everything still compiles cleanly against the current toolchain before real images get spun. Inggs reported the main component was done on every architecture except riscv64, with universe and multiverse still grinding through the queue. He pointed the community at an FTBFS report for triaging failures, a reminder that freezing a release this size is a genuinely large coordinated effort.
It rarely makes headlines. Interim releases slip under the radar routinely, since they're short-lived and aimed at enthusiasts rather than enterprises. But the October drops are where Ubuntu moves fastest, adopting the latest upstream software and absorbing lessons that usually filter into the next LTS. You might recall that the October 2025 drop was the one that finally made Wayland the default by quietly dropping X11, a decision that carried straight through into this year's Raccoon LTS.
What you actually get
Stonking Stingray is a textbook non-LTS. It carries nine months of free support, landing roughly July 15, 2027, before Canonical nudges you forward. That's the interim model in a nutshell: fast, fresh, and deliberately temporary.
Kernel-wise it's targeting the Linux 7.3 series. At the point this was recorded, 7.3 was still in candidate form, sitting at 7.3-rc1, which tracks cleanly with the broader 7.x rollout rolling through Linux this autumn.
The desktop rides on the GNOME 50 foundation laid by the previous LTS, Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon," which landed April 23. Raccoon was a landmark drop on its own: it formally dropped Xorg/X11 support, bumped recommended RAM to 6 GB, and swapped in apps like "Showtime" for media and "Resources" for system monitoring.
What you won't find is any reason to panic about stability on launch. It's an interim release, so treat it as such. Enthusiasts and developers who want the newest stack today are the real target audience; enterprises generally stay put on an LTS. But historically, the features that survive an interim drop are exactly what mature into the next one, which is what makes Stonking Stingray a genuine proving ground.
Grabbing it
The beta images are already live, last updated October 1. If you'd rather not chase the exact launch minute, the RC images and the October 15 date are your natural milestones. The final-freeze notice makes it clear the team is still courting testers to keep the launch smooth.
