Ubuntu Linux 25.10 Has Arrived
Canonical today announced the release of Ubuntu 25.10, codenamed “Questing Quokka”. This update brings improvements to security, compatibility, and the core desktop experience and is likely very important for Long Term Support (LTS) coming in 2026.
The first thing most users will notice is the new desktop, which runs GNOME 49. This is a great update, bringing a ton of tweaks and some genuinely useful new features. You can now control your media playback and feed directly from the lock screen. For those of us with modern monitors, there are new individual brightness settings for HDR displays, which is fantastic.
Beyond the GNOME shell itself, Ubuntu 25.10 made some key application swaps. The default image viewer is now Loupe and the new default terminal emulator is Ptyxis. Both of these apps are sleek and modern that fit perfectly with the overall refreshed look of the desktop. They’re built on the latest technology, making them more capable and a welcome change from the older apps they replace.
If you select the “Install Restricted Extras” option during setup, you now get better Bluetooth audio management. This includes support for AAC codecs, which is a huge plus for anyone using quality wireless headphones.
Canonical is cracking down on potential vulnerabilities by moving key elements of the operating system to Rust, a memory-safe programming language. This release introduces sudo-rs as the default implementation of the all-important sudo tool. For those unfamiliar, sudo is what you use to run commands with administrative privileges.
Moving from sudo to a memory-safe language is a huge deal because it eliminates a whole class of security bugs like buffer overflows that have plagued C-based system tools for decades. Traditional sudo is still available if you absolutely need it, but switching to Rust is important because it improves the overall security of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 25.10 is also the first major Linux distribution to adopt uutils’ implementation of coreutils, which is also a rewrite of Rust, for these essential system utilities. You may not see these changes every day, but they are important to make the operating system more resilient for the LTS release.
If you’re a security-conscious user or developer, there’s even more reason to be excited. Ubuntu 25.10 offers experimental support for TPM-based full disk encryption. This uses the Trusted Platform Module, a security chip found in most modern PCs, to store the cryptographic keys that unlock your hard drive.
This makes your data inaccessible at rest without the correct key at boot time. Ubuntu doesn’t yet recommend it for production environments, but new features like passphrase support, recovery key management, and better firmware update integration pave the way for this to be a major security feature in the next LTS.
Additionally, Network Time Security is now enabled by default. This is a secure way for your computer to synchronize its clock, adding a cryptographic layer of authentication over the old, insecure NTP protocol. Under the hood, this release is powered by Linux kernel 6.17, which brings significant compatibility improvements, especially for newer silicon.
You can download this new version from the Canonical website or use an alternative download like BitTorrent or mirror.
Source: Canonical blog
