Say goodbye to people thinking you’re a creep next time you take a desktop screenshot in a public space, as GNOME 51 has changed the sound effect that plays when you do. For a while now, when you screen grab your desktop or an app window, the accompanying sound effect is a camera shutter, like the one you hear when you take a photo on a smartphone. Cute in the privacy of your own home, but less cute in a public setting like an office or café. The sound is the issue: how are people to know you’re taking desktop […]

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Ubuntu 26.10 changes how the system choose which processes are killed when memory runs low, making a rogue browser tab is less likely to punt you back to the login screen. When your system runs out of memory, the kernel’s out-of-memory (OOM) killer kicks in, terminating processes to recover some. The issue is that doesn’t always kill the right things. By default, many apps and critical desktop services share the same priority score. When the OOM killer is choosing its victim target, it looks at their OOM scores, not “what’s using the most memory”. Firefox and GNOME Shell, for example, […]

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In the mood for testing? The fourth monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 is now available for download. It’s unusual for Ubuntu to produce a snapshot the same month a beta release is due, and this is also the second snapshot published this month: Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 3 arrived in early September. Strange times with the Stonking Stingray! “These should be very close to what the Beta candidates will look like next week, so don’t shy away from testing them”, said Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta in the mailing list announcement. Since Snapshot 3, more package updates have been updated: the GNOME 51 […]

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Ubuntu 26.10 completes the distro’s move to Rust-based core utilities, with the commands previously held back due to security issues now migrated to memory-safe versions. cp, mv and rm were held back on their GNU versions in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due to a crop of TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) issues that needed to be fixed in the uutils versions.  With those issues resolved upstream, Ubuntu 26.10 finishes the job. The ‘Stonking Stingray’ ships a full set of Rust core utilities, which encompasses common command-line tools like ls, cat, chmod and  du. Canonical donates €40k a year to help fund work on Rust software Canonical’s engineers began ‘oxidising’ the distro – replacing foundational […]

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Ubuntu 26.10 'Stonking Stingray' is getting a newer kernel than planned. Canonical has switched its target from Linux 7.2 to Linux 7.3.

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The official wallpaper for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stringray’ release has been revealed, alongside artwork bearing the official mascot. No huge surprises to see the standard formula hole. The distro’s designers have, once again, opted for a dark purple/aubergine backdrop that bears a vectorised mascot in the middle, which for this release is a stingray: No illustrative nod to the “stonking” adjective of the codename, but as most people aren’t even aware it is a word, perfectly understandable. There are 4 variants of the default wallpaper for Ubuntu 26.10. The colour one you see above, plus dark and a […]

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Ubuntu 26.10 adds an amd64-v3 ISO to its daily builds, letting you to install the Linux distribution with packages optimised for the x86-64-v3 CPUs.

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The third, and potentially final, monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 is available for download. There were no monthly snapshots of the ‘Stonking Stingray’ in August or July – no reason has been given – and the Ubuntu 26.10 beta release is scheduled for release on 24 September. Thus, this could be the final snapshot of the, though Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta says that a “surprise snapshot to test some changes to our machinery” might appear. Ubuntu’s monthly snapshots are strictly for testing. They aren’t alpha builds and they aren’t production ready. The team say to view them as “throwaway artifacts”. Their […]

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AI-powered voice typing is coming to Ubuntu in Myna, a speech-to-text feature that lets you talk into any valid text field. It’s still a work in progress, but I grabbed an early build to see how it’s shaping up. With Ubuntu 26.10 now entering its freeze, the user-facing pieces of myna are falling in to place. This week, a new GNOME Shell extension was added to default installs to provide an on-screen indicator when myna is listening and recording. To be clear: Myna is not a GNOME Shell extension. It’s an orchestrator that loads an AI model, handles hot-key activation, […]

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Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed ‘Stonking Stingray’, entered feature freeze on 20 August – though the formal announcement arrive later than usual. From this point onwards, development focus shifts from landing major changes to improving them, along with the rest of the package set, ahead of the final, stable Ubuntu 26.10 release in October. “Ideally, you should all now be focusing on bug fixing rather than getting new features into the release”, said Paride Legovini, engineer at Canonical, in a post on the Ubuntu developer mailing list on 24 August, 2026. However, the final makeup of Ubuntu 26.10 – set to offer […]

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GNOME 51, due out in September, could include a redesigned search experience. Presently, when you trigger a search from the GNOME Shell overview, a dedicated search results screen replaces the one you were looking at, either the workspaces or app picker. But a change targeted for GNOME Shell in v51 plans to change that. Modern GNOME Shell is designed around a ‘semantic’ model, where elements visibly enter and exit from a specific place (with animations providing cues) so you know how one screen relates to the next. Under this model, search results would appear in an overlay that ‘spawns out […]

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Ubuntu is moving hwctl from Deb package to snap-only distribution, a change Canonical says improves security and desktop integration.

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Wondering if your laptop or desktop PC is Ubuntu Certified? Ubuntu 26.10 is adding a new way to check from the Settings app. A new row in Settings > System > About reads “check if this computer is Ubuntu Certified”. Clicking it opens a new page that will read the local/cached status from the com.ubuntu.hwctl service (the Canonical hardware API introduced in 2025). Ubuntu’s has had a command-line way to check certification for a while, using hwlib. In 26.10 (Stonking Stingray), you’ll be able to check it via Settings rather than through terminal command. The statuses which can be shown: There’s also an […]

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The Desktop Icons NG (aka DING) GNOME Shell extension Ubuntu uses to put icons on your literal desktop, has been busy – it finished its port to GTK4, patched memory leaks and improved a few of its lesser-known features. The GTK4 port landed in v51.0.0, released this month, alongside early support for GNOME 51 (since that’s the GNOME version Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with in October). Prior to that, there were other, smaller in June with fixes for memory leaks and buffs to usability. DING’s GTK4 port – not to be confused with a separate GTK4 fork I covered back in […]

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Ubuntu 26.10 is replacing its D-Bus implementation for the first time since 2004, swapping dbus-daemon for dbus-broker – a change end-users are unlikely to notice. Processes on your desktop talk to each other and to the host system using D-Bus, a ‘message’ bus. This is what the Ubuntu Dock uses to show unread-count badges for apps, what tells your desktop a USB drive has been plugged in, and so on. Two buses are in play. There’s aa system bus, shared across the whole device, handling hardware and background services, and a user session bus to handle desktop and app integrations […]

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Canonical wants ntpd-rs, a Rust rewrite of NTP (Network Time Protocol), to become Ubuntu’s default time sync client. To help get there, Canonical has become a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation, the non-profit behind ntpd-rs, committing €40,000 a year to help fund its memory-safe software projects. The goal is to make the Rust-based version the default time sync client and server in Ubuntu 27.04, and it will be made it available for testing in Ubuntu 26.10, out in October. Eventually, it’ll also replace chrony, linuxptp and gpsd for time-syncing use cases, according to Jon Seager, Ubuntu VP of Engineering at Canonical. Your Ubuntu system keeps […]

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Ubuntu is working on speech-to-text AI transcription so you can talk to type. It's powered by project Myna. Here's how it'll work and why it's adding it.

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Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 is available to download, the second of four snapshots planned for the ‘Stonking Stingray’ development cycle ahead of a stable release in October. As with the first snapshot, there’s not a lot “new” stuff to see or test out, so unless you’re a developer or an avid bug hunter there’s little reason to rush off and try it. Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta, announcing the release on Ubuntu’s developer mailing list, warns of a “breaking change” – don’t panic: it’s not in the image itself, but the URL it’s accessed from. Over the past few weeks the Ubuntu […]

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Ubuntu has announced an ‘important policy update’, making beta releases mandatory for all Ubuntu flavours, no exceptions. Most flavours already hit the beta milestone every six months without issue. But until now a flavour that missed the deadline could still be granted a one-off exception. During the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, that’s what happened with Ubuntu Kylin, the Chinese-orientated spin that uses the UKUI desktop. It missed the Beta window but still made the final release. That won’t happen again. To get an official stable release, a flavour now must have a beta release out the same time as every […]

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