Canonical today announced the release of Ubuntu 25.10, codenamed "Questing Quokka." This update comes with improvements across security, compatibility, and the core desktop experience and is likely very important for the long-term support (LTS) coming in 2026.
The first thing most users will notice is the new desktop, which is running GNOME 49. This is a great update, bringing a ton of polish and some genuinely useful new features. You can now control your media playback and power right 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 has made a couple of key app swaps. The default image viewer is now Loupe, and the new default terminal emulator is Ptyxis. Both of these are sleek, modern applications that fit in perfectly with the overall refreshed look and feel of the desktop. They're built on the newer tech, making them more performant and a welcome change from the older applications they replace.
If you select the "install restricted extras" option during setup, you now get better Bluetooth audio handling. This includes support for AAC codecs, which is a big win for anyone using quality wireless headphones.
Canonical is cracking down hard on potential vulnerabilities by moving key parts 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.
Switching sudo to a memory-safe language is a huge deal because it eliminates an entire class of security bugs like buffer overflows that have plagued C-based system tools for decades. The traditional sudo is still available if you absolutely need it, but the move to the Rust version is important because it improves Ubuntu's overall security.
Ubuntu 25.10 is also the first major Linux distribution to embrace uutils' implementation of coreutils, which is also a Rust rewrite, for those essential system utilities. You might not see these changes every day, but they are important for making the operating system more resilient for the LTS version.
If you're a security-focused user or a developer, there's even more to be excited about. Ubuntu 25.10 has experimental support for TPM-backed 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 isn't recommending this for production environments yet, but the new features like passphrase support, recovery key management, and better firmware update integration are paving the way for it to be a top security feature in the next LTS.
On top of that, 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 the Linux kernel 6.17, which brings significant compatibility improvements, especially for newer silicon.
You can download this new release on the Canonical website , or you can use an alternative download like BitTorrent or a mirror.
Source: Canonical Blog
