Ubuntu 25.10 came out on 9 October, 2025. This new interim release is the last one of three in this development cycle. The next release will be the long term support (LTS) version, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, expected on 23 April, 2026. As is often the case with the third of three interim releases, this one brings many new things for both desktop users and behind-the-scenes, to enable testing prior to the LTS. 25.10 is Ubuntu's 43rd release and the 17th with the modified GNOME 3 desktop. Because it is an interim release, it is supported for only nine months, until July 2026. Named after the smiling Australian marsupial, this version has the codename Questing Quokka. This is the second Ubuntu release that has a "Q" code name. The previous one was Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, which was released on 18 October 2012, 13 years ago. Since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet and two Ubuntu releases per year, the letters naturally repeat on a 13 year cycle. This release did ship with one undesirable new bug: it arrived with Flatpaks broken. Flatpak is a system for installing applications. The breakage was caused by a problem between AppArmour and fusermount3 permissions. A fix was quickly propagated, though, installing apparmor 5.0.0~alpha1-0ubuntu8.1. Yes, this was a failure of beta testing, but since Flatpaks are not installed on Ubuntu by default, it is not entirely surprising that it was not caught. Installation I downloaded Ubuntu 25.10 from the official source via BitTorrent using Transmission. Once I had the file I carried out a SHA256 sum check to ensure that the ISO file download was good, which it was. This release has actually dropped in size over the previous one, from 6.28 GB with Ubuntu 25.04 to 5.8 GB this time around, a decrease of 580 MB, or 9%. This was a bit of a surprise, but smaller downloads are always welcome! I tested out Ubuntu 25.10 live from a USB stick using Ventoy 1.1.07, which worked perfectly. System requirements The recommended minimum system requirements for Ubuntu 25.10 have not changed in the five years since the 20.04 LTS and remain: 2 GHz dual-core processor 4096 MiB RAM (system memory) for physical installs 2048 MiB RAM for virtualised installs 25 GB (8.6 GB for minimal) of hard-drive space (or USB stick, memory card or external drive but see LiveCD for an alternative approach) 3D acceleration-capable GPU with at least 256 MB of VRAM 1024x768 or higher resolution display USB flash drive or DVD drive or for the installer media Internet access is helpful Overall, this means that Ubuntu 25.10 should run fine on hardware designed for Windows 7 or later although I suggest at least 8 GB of RAM as a working minimum, especially for web browsing. New While this release has some new things for desktop users, there is also a lot that is new behind the scenes. Here is an overview. The Ubuntu 25.10 desktop is based on GNOME 49. It includes two new default user applications, the Ptyxis terminal emulator and the Loupe image viewer, as described below under applications. This release came out with Linux kernel 6.17 RC 7 which is a "release candidate" version rather than an actual "stable" kernel (Don't worry, it is actually stable). A few weeks after the release, the stable version should be pushed out via the update process. For RISC-V hardware the kernels from now on only support RVA23S64 ISA profiles, so older RISC-V hardware will not be able to run this and later Ubuntu releases. This kernel also has full support for Intel Core Ultra Xe3 integrated Intel Arc graphics, Intel Arc Pro B50 and B60 Battlemage discrete GPUs, plus initial support for Intel's next-generation Panther Lake client platform. Suspend-resume support now uses a proprietary Nvidia driver on devices with Nvidia hardware, to prevent corruptions or freeze-ups on waking. Ubuntu 25.10 uses systemd 257.9 as its initialization system. Systemd has been employed on Ubuntu for over ten years, since Ubuntu 15.04, and this marks 22 releases without any issues. I will admit I was a bit skeptical when systemd was first introduced, replacing Canonical’s Upstart, but it has proven itself over time. Starting with this release, the Rust-based sudo-rs is now the default sudo provider, replacing the original sudo (now called sudo-ws). The good news for users is that it works the same way as the old sudo did. The operating system core utilities are now provided by the rust-coreutils 0.2.2 package which features "incredible performance improvements to base64". Because the rust-coreutils are not fully compatible yet system-wide, the old utilities are still installed. There is a new TPM-backed disk encryption which allows passphrase support and management, regeneration of the recovery key and better integration with firmware updates. Also on installation, you can choose to Install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and additional media formats, which will enable screen recording to be hardware accelerated on hardware that is supported. This will be popular among users: when there are system updates available, the Software Updater window no longer pops up, stealing keyboard focus. Instead, there is a notification, with options to open the Software Updater or to install all the updates directly. Furthermore, a system tray icon reminds you that updates are available, even if you dismiss the notification, and also provides a quick way to apply all the updates or read through the list of them in Software Updater. Ubuntu 25.10 only uses a Wayland display server, there is no more X11 support, because GNOME Shell can no longer run on X11. There are benefits though, as fractional scaling is improved and blurriness eliminated. The default monospace font size used in terminals and similar has been reduced to match the default user interface font size. It can be increased in individual applications or globally with fractional scaling. Even though there is no more X11 on Ubuntu 25.10, you can still run any "unconverted" X11-only applications because the XWayland compatibility layer comes already installed. In the Security Center, users can now manage recovery keys for the TPM-backed Full Disk Encryption. Ubuntu 25.10 now uses Dracut for its default initial ramdisk infrastructure, replacing initramfs-tools. Dracut uses systemd in the initial ramdisk and supports new features like Bluetooth and NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Users can also now control audio playback from the lock screen which means you can turn things that are playing off without unlocking. Furthermore, in GNOME 49 the Do Not Disturb switch has been moved from the notification and calendar applet up to the top right Quick Settings menu which is a more logical place to find it. There is a new waiting system "spinner" that is less distracting than the old one, an expanded Yaru icon set with a new trash icon and improvements to window corner radius rendering. There are also many behind-the-scenes changes to packages and toolchains that most desktop users will probably not notice. For both desktop and server these include: Apache 2.4.64; APT 3.1.6 for package management, including apt why and apt why-not commands; Bacula 15.0.3, now in the main repo (was in the “universe” before); binutils 2.45, BlueZ 5.83 14 bluetooth; Chrony 4.7 time management; cloud-init 25.3; Django 5.2; Dovecot 2.4; GCC 15.2; glibc 2.42; Golang 1.24; HAProxy 3.0.10; libvirt 11.6.0; LLVM defaulting to version 20, with 21 available; MySQL 8.4; .NET 10; Netplan v1.1.2ubuntu3 which adds support for non-standard OVS setups, for instance inside Snap environments; Nginx 1.26.3; OpenJDK 21 (LTS), with version 25 (LTS) and an early access snapshot of version 26 available; OpenLDAP 2.6.10; OpenSSH 10.0; OpenStack 2025.2 (Flamingo); OpenSSL 3.5.3; Open vSwitch (OVS) 3.6.0; Open Virtual Network (OVN) 25.09.0; PHP 8.4.11; PostgreSQL 17.6; Python 3.13.7, with 3.14 available; QEMU 10.1.0; Rust 1.85, with 1.88 also available; Samba 4.22; Strongswan 6.0.1; sos (sosreport) 4.10.0; Valkey 8.1.1 and finally that the Zig general-purpose programming language and toolchain is available for the first time in Ubuntu and defaults to version 0.14.1. I will add that for desktop users, if you don’t know what any of these are, you don’t need to worry! Settings Ubuntu continues to offer only limited choices in user customization. There are just two window themes: light and dark, although there remains a choice of ten highlight colors (with orange set as the default). This doesn’t seem like a lot of choices compared to Kubuntu or Pop!_OS, but it probably enough for most users to make it feel their own, even for an “enterprise-focused” distribution like Ubuntu is today. Ubuntu 25.10 is code-named Questing Quokka and so, predictably, it comes with a new quokka-themed light wallpaper which changes to a dark wallpaper when the window color theme is changed from light to dark. There are 11 wallpapers provided, of which seven are quokka-themed, one is a very bright camel caravan and the 4 remaining are toned down Ubuntu wallpapers. Applications Some of the applications included with the full 25.10 extended selection installation are: Archive Manager (file-roller) 44.5 file archiver* CUPS 2.4.12 printing system* Deja Dup 49.9 file back-ups Firefox 143.0.4 web browser** GNOME Calculator 48.0 desktop calculator* GNOME Calendar 48.1 desktop calendar* GNOME Clocks 48.0 clocks* GNOME Disks 48.0 disk manager* GNOME Disks Usage Analyzer (baobab) 48.0 disk manager GNOME Document Scanner (simple-scan) 48.1 optical scanner GNOME Document Viewer (papers) 48.0 PDF viewer* GNOME Files (nautilus) 49.0 file manager GNOME Image Viewer (Loupe) 47.0 image viewer GNOME Snapshot 49 alpha webcam application GNOME System Monitor 48.1 system monitor GNOME Terminal (Ptyxis) 49.1 terminal emulator GNOME Text Editor 48.3 text editor GNOME Videos (totem) 43.2 movie player Gparted 1.6.0 partition editor*** LibreOffice 25.8.1 office suite, less LibreOffice Base PipeWire 1.4.7 audio controller Remmina 1.4.40 remote desktop client Rhythmbox 3.4.8 music player* Security Center (desktop-security-center) 0+git.d2e7fd4 security controller** Shotwell 0.32.10 photo manager* Startup Disk Creator (usb-creator-gtk) 0.4.1 USB ISO writer* Systemd 257.9 init system Thunderbird 140.3.0 ESR email client** Transmission 4.1.0 bit torrent client Ubuntu App Center 1.0.0 package management system** Wget 1.25.0 command line webpage downloader * indicates same application version as used in Ubuntu 25.04 ** supplied as a Snap, so the version depends on the upstream package manager *** included on the ISO for boot-up, but not included in a full installation As can be seen, despite the desktop being upgraded to GNOME 49, there are very few applications from the GNOME 49 desktop release and, instead, it has a collection of older GNOME applications, most of which are from GNOME 48 with a few holdovers from GNOME 43, 44 and 47. There are two changes to the suite of default applications in this release. The venerable GNOME Terminal has been replaced by the GTK4 and libAdwaita-based GNOME Ptyxis. Most desktop users will probably not notice that swap-out except for the cute red header bar when using sudo commands. It is even still called "Terminal" on the menus and on its "about" box, so you won't have to try to figure out how to pronounce "Ptyxis" for everyday conversation. In English, the word seems to be unique to this software application, although it is derived from the Greek word πτυχίς which means "degrees". The other application change is that GNOME Image Viewer (Eye of Gnome) or “EOG” has been replaced with the Rust-based Loupe which uses the Glycin image rendering library. Loupe is also listed as "Image Viewer" on the menus and in its "about" box. It introduces more capabilities than EOG had, including multi-touch gestures and image cropping. Some of the features, like image rotation, are hidden behind menus whereas EOG had them on-screen. The name “loupe” refers to a small magnification device (and not a wolf). Both the old GNOME Terminal and EOG remain available to install in the repositories, in case you don't like the new applications. The GNOME Files (nautilus) 49.0 file manager introduces a number of upgrades including a better progress bar display now in the sidebar, improved search display, the ability to copy network addresses directly from the networking panel, the incremental loading of files in MTP-backed folders and that the sidebar now sorts devices by name. As in recent Ubuntu releases, if you install Ubuntu's default minimal installation you will get only Firefox, Nautilus, GNOME Text Editor and a few GNOME utilities, although any desired applications can easily be added from the repositories via Ubuntu Software or APT from the command line. The download ISO file includes the complete extended selection of applications, though, in case you would rather do the full installation. You can note that if you run a live session, it presents the full extended selection. The choice between the two installation options is really a trade-off between spending the time adding the applications that you want versus removing the ones that you don't want. Conclusions One thing you do notice in Ubuntu over time is that more and more it is using the Rust programming language and, while that may sound like the “programming flavor-of-the-day”, it actually provides many advantages especially in the area of memory safety. At least for the next few years, much of the future of Linux is going to be “corroded” and that is probably a benefit to users. Other than that one noted Flatpak problem which was quickly solved, Ubuntu 25.10 is another good release. The next release will be the long term support version that completes this development cycle, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, expected out on 23 April 2026. External links Official website: https://ubuntu.com/