Ubuntu Stonking Stingray swims into spotlight with pre-release kernel

The latest interim release of Ubuntu is here, complete with kernel 7.3 – even though it isn't officially out yet.

It also includes a new speech-to-text system that is intriguing but not fully useful.

Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" arrived on time.

This is just a couple of weeks after the beta version that we looked at earlier this month, suggesting that the team didn’t encounter any show-stopper bugs.

The faster kernel release cycle that Canonical adopted in 2024 has slightly bitten them this time around: the Linux kernel’s new faster AI-boosted release cycle means that 7.2 is relatively old now, but 7.3 isn’t quite ready yet; at the time of writing, it’s on Release Candidate 7 – but Canonical has jumped the gun and used it anyway.

So, the release version of Ubuntu 26.10 comes with a pre-release kernel, and machines will get updated to the completed 7.3 as soon as it’s available.

We tried the default GNOME edition, with GNOME 51.

It looks identical to the beta version.

The most visible difference in this release is in the window-tiling assistant, which now displays a Windows-like transient pop-up box offering various tiled arrangements when you drag a window to the edge of the screen.

The Myna speech-to-text tool, whose announcement we covered back in June, is now available – albeit as a technology preview.

We tested the beta on an old ThinkPad, and while the pre-release OS ran perfectly, Myna didn't work. (Incidentally, after switching to a non-GPU LLM, it does work in the release version – just very slowly.) So, we tried the release version on our newer testbed machine, a Dell XPS 9370.

The installation process is more straightforward now, with some official instructions, and as the Dell doesn't have an unsupported Nvidia GPU to complicate things, it worked fine.

The installation pulls in nearly a gigabyte of dependencies and language model files: since the installation ISO is already 6⅔ GB, it's probably a good thing that it’s not included.

We tested it in the Writer module of LibreOffice 26.8.