Kubuntu 26.10 Release Notes

Kubuntu 26.10 Release Notes

October 15, 2026

The Latest KDE Plasma on Ubuntu’s Newest Interim Release

The Kubuntu team is happy to announce the release of Kubuntu 26.10, codenamed “Stonking Stingray”! Building on the Ubuntu 26.10 base released today by Canonical, Kubuntu 26.10 ships Plasma 6.7 (6.7.5) alongside Qt 6.11.2, KDE Frameworks 6.29.0 and KDE Gear 26.08.1, on Linux kernel 7.3.

Kubuntu 26.10 is an interim release and will receive security updates and critical fixes for 9 months, until July 2027. If you need long-term support, Kubuntu 26.04 LTS remains supported until April 2029.

Kubuntu remains completely free to download, use, and share. Download it now and join our community on Discourse.

Highlights from Plasma 6.7

These Plasma 6.7 features ship in Kubuntu 26.10 (Plasma 6.7.5 on the ISO). See the Plasma 6.7 announcement for the full list.

  1. Per-screen virtual desktops Each display can keep its own set of desktops.

  2. Faster virtual desktop switching in the Overview Press Meta+W to open Overview, then scroll or press Page Up / Page Down to switch virtual desktops.

  3. Clearer software management in Discover Discover has a clearer Install button, redesigned app cards, a simpler sort order, and installed software grouped by type.

  4. Light/dark toggle, theming and Union Switch between light and dark Global Themes at once. Oxygen and Air are brought back up to date with Breeze. Breeze gains rounded highlights and click effects. The new Union theming system lands as a tech preview (kde-style-union is on the ISO).

Also included with Plasma 6.7.5 on the ISO: a microphone volume test (plasma-pa), press-and-hold for special characters on the virtual keyboard (plasma-keyboard), Background Apps in the System Tray, printer job badges and Windows shared printing (print-manager with Samba client tools), drag-and-drop launcher favourites, time-zone offsets in the Digital Clock, and type-ahead on the desktop.

Wayland by Default

The Plasma Wayland session is the default and fully supported session. The Plasma X11 session is not installed by default and is not supported by the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu 26.10 is the last Kubuntu release where the plasma-session-x11 package will be available.

What’s New Under the Hood

From the Ubuntu 26.10 release notes:

  • Linux kernel 7.3. The release images ship kernel 7.3.0-9.9.
  • KDE Applications 26.08.1: Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, Kdenlive and the rest of KDE Gear.
  • Firefox 157 (Snap) and LibreOffice 26.8.1.
  • systemd 261.3.
  • 100% Rust coreutils: the remaining GNU utilities (cp, mv, rm) have now moved to the Rust uutils implementation.
  • Updated developer toolchain: GCC 15.2, Python 3.14.7, Rust 1.97, Go 1.27, LLVM 22, OpenJDK 25 (OpenJDK 27 available) and .NET 10.
  • TPM-backed full-disk encryption can now be installed on machines without a hardware root of trust, if you also set a PIN or passphrase.

Upgrading

Upgrade from Kubuntu 26.04 LTS by setting “Release Upgrade” to “Normal releases” in sudo software-properties-qt (or Prompt=normal in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades) and running the release upgrader.

Note: Systems using TPM-backed full-disk encryption cannot upgrade from 26.04 LTS to 26.10 at release. Ubuntu expects to enable these upgrades during the 26.10 lifecycle.

A huge thank you to our volunteer contributors, testers, bug reporters, and the upstream KDE and Ubuntu teams for making Stonking Stingray a reality.

Ready to dive in? Download Kubuntu 26.10. Questions? Head to Discourse or join us on Matrix at #kubuntu:matrix.org.