Ubuntu 26.10 Beta Moves Coreutils to Rust
Administrators testing Ubuntu 26.10 should check scripts that rely on file operations. The beta replaces GNU Coreutils with uutils coreutils, bringing Rust implementations of commands including cp, mv and rm into the system. Linuxiac's compatibility guidance outlines what to test.
Canonical's "Stonking Stingray" beta is a week behind schedule and starts the full package freeze. The development team will now focus on testing and bug fixes ahead of the scheduled October 15 release. Ubuntu 26.10 is an intermediate release with nine months of support. Canonical recommends using the beta to find bugs, not installing it on a main system.
Ubuntu 26.10 also replaces dbus-daemon, used in Ubuntu since 2004, with dbus-broker.
Rust reaches more of the system
The coreutils switch is the biggest change to low-level command-line tools. Canonical says the Rust transition is intended to reduce memory-safety risks, including use-after-free and out-of-bounds errors. Checks run at compile time and, where needed, at runtime. The Canonical security overview confirms that Ubuntu 26.10 replaces the GNU versions of cp, mv and rm retained in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Support for the release is scheduled through July 2027.
Optional Sequoia PGP support is also in the beta. It is a Rust implementation of OpenPGP. Plans to make its sq and sqv tools replacements for gpg and gpgv remain future plans. Optional ntpd-rs support is included as well; Canonical plans to make it the default NTP server in Ubuntu 27.04.
OpenSSH is now split into openssh and openssh-gssapi. That separates GSSAPI/Kerberos support, which relies on an external patch and is needed by a minority of users. Canonical has also changed out-of-memory handling to lower the kill priority of essential desktop processes. Under memory pressure, that reduces the chance of losing an entire desktop session.
Secure Boot takes a different turn. The digitally signed GRUB boot manager drops support for several image formats and Apple partition tables. It also excludes Btrfs and XFS from the /boot partition, along with ZFS and LUKS. The installer will continue to use ext4 for /boot.
For Secure Boot, Ubuntu 26.10's signed GRUB supports ext4, FAT and ISO9660 for /boot. The supported configurations also exclude LVM and software RAID other than RAID1.
Desktop changes and experimental hardware support
GNOME 51 is designed to prevent animation stuttering under heavy system load. Its Tiling Assistant adds interactive layouts: drag a window to the top of the screen to see placement options, then GNOME suggests other open windows for the remaining spaces. The DING desktop-icons extension has moved to GTK4.
The App Center now handles proprietary drivers through Add-ons > Additional Drivers. That option appears only on systems that need proprietary drivers hosted in Ubuntu's repositories. Experimental local speech recognition, powered by Canonical's Myna system, can dictate text into the active application using a keyboard shortcut. It supports Whisper models, with Parakeet and FunASR also available.
The beta runs the Linux 7.3-rc kernel and Mesa 26.2. Experimental x86-64-v3 images target processors with instructions such as AVX2 and FMA. The overall performance improvement is around 1%, though compute-intensive applications may gain more. Official Ubuntu Desktop images now support the RISC-V boards SpacemiT K3 and SiFive BigSky. Initial compatibility is also available for laptops based on Qualcomm's ARM Snapdragon X2 architecture.
Other announced changes include OpenSSL 4.0 and post-quantum cryptography. Signed GRUB is also being updated, extending the release beyond the coreutils migration.
Canonical has released beta images for Ubuntu flavors. Kubuntu includes KDE Plasma 6.7; Lubuntu ships with LXQt 2.4. By contrast, the 3D Pinball report says Microsoft is still considering a return of the classic Windows feature.
