Ubuntu 25.10, code-name Questing Quokka, is now available for Beta testing!
The developer team announced the release last night for Ubuntu Desktop, Server, WSL, Cloud products, and official flavors.
Ubuntu 25.10 is a new short-term release with 9-month support until July 2026. It features GNOME 49, Kernel 6.17, and various other toolkit and packages updates.
The new Kernel is still in RC release stage at the moment. Compare to Kernel 6.14 in current 24.04 and 25.10, it features many new and improved hardware support, drivers, and performance improvements. For detailed changes, go HERE and HERE.
The Ubuntu Desktop so far has GNOME 49 RC, though the stable release of this desktop environment was just released 2 days ago, which features:
- New
Showtimevideo player (not pre-installed in Ubuntu with default mode, though available in App Center). - New
Papersdocument viewer. - Remove ‘GNOME on Xorg’ (Ubuntu on Xorg) session, meaning Wayland only.
- Music playback control from lock screen.
- Improve remote desktop with multi-touch, relative mouse input, and additional virtual desktop.
- Add configuration for pointing stick (aka TrackPoint).
- Support relative dials on tablet pads.
- Brightness in the Quick Settings when HDR is enabled, with external monitors support.
- And more. See the official release note.
As you know, Ubuntu features a customized GNOME desktop experience. The 25.10 release replaced the default terminal with Ptyxis, which features first-class container integration.
And, it finally added Loupe as default image viewer, which was introduced in GNOME since v45. The image viewer features sandboxed image loading by using Glycin library, which also handles the background image loading in Gnome 49.
New default Ptyxis terminal emulator
Other changes in the Beta include screen reader support in new desktop installer, TPM-backed Full Disk Encryption recovery key management, and tryboot’s A/B booting support on Raspberry Pi.
There are as well toolkit updates, including systemd 257, gcc 15.2, binutils 2.45, glic 2.42, python 3.13.7, LLVM 20, Rust 1.85, Golang 1.24, openJDK 25, Mysql 8.4, Ruby 3.3, and more.
The final release of Ubuntu 25.10 is planned for October 9. For more about it, see the official release note.
Get Ubuntu 25.10 Beta
NOTE: Ubuntu 25.10 so far has a bug that prevents it from loading other dual-/multi-boot OSes. Configure apparmor didn’t work in my case, and I end up disabling Apparmor to get back Ubuntu 24.04.
For Ubuntu 25.04, it’s now able to upgrade to this 25.10 Beta, by firstly installing all available updates, then launch “Update Manager” via the command below:
update-manager -d
And if everything goes well, you’ll be able to upgrade from Beta to 25.10 final by installing updates regularly through “Software Updater”.
NOTE: It’s IMPORTANT to backup your data before upgrading, as it may have bug that breaks your system.
For choice, the iso images of the Beta are available to download at the link below:
Don’t know why, but it misses amd64 iso image at the moment of writing. To workaround the issue, you may choose a download mirror instead to get the ISO.
And for non-GNOME users, there are also 10 official flavors features different desktop environments, which can be download from either their websites or this page.
