The newest interim launch of Ubuntu is right here, showcasing some vital modifications. This is not a long-term launch, but a lot of its variations might be in 26.04 subsequent 12 months.
On the finish of final week, Canonical released Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka,” together with 9 of the ten official flavors. The release notes cowl what’s new.
Questing has a wallaby-themed wallpaper, and the complete set up has 12 snap packages
A reasonably vital bug was found after the Quokka was launched: Flatpak is broken attributable to a bug in how Ubuntu’s AppArmor safety module handles the fusermount3 command. There’s a workaround and a repair is in progress. The Ubuntu desktop would not embody Flatpak as customary and neither do any of the flavors, however many customers do desire Flatpak to Canonical’s personal Snap format. A lot in order that Flatpak is the default in a number of downstream Ubuntu-based distros, notably Linux Mint but additionally together with Elementary OS, Zorin OS, and Anduin OS.
Ubuntu and its upstream Debian each use AppArmor, whereas most distros from the Purple Hat household use SELinux as a substitute. Notably, the not too long ago launched openSUSE Leap 16 switched from AppArmor to SELinux, as we reported once we looked at the release candidate in August.
The lacking taste is Ubuntu Unity, of which there will not be a Questing model. On the remix’s Telegram channel, admin Maik Adamietz stated:
The Register has already coated a lot of what is new in model 25.10. As a substitute of the GNU coreutils, it has new implementations in Rust, together with the sudo utility. “Questing” features a preview model of the TPM-chip backed Full Disk Encryption system, which Canonical has been engaged on for a few years.
The Questing Budgie is just a little smaller and cleaner – simply 9 snaps, for example. Who’s a fairly boy then?
The default graphical desktop version makes use of GNOME 49 with some new apps, as we described when it reached beta. As we reported earlier in the development cycle, solely GNOME on Wayland is included. There is no X11 session. This additionally applies to Kubuntu 25.10, which comes with KDE Plasma 6.4 and is equally Wayland-centric.
This suggests a couple of vital particulars that we really feel we should always spell out. Firstly, each Ubuntu 25.10 and Kubuntu 25.10 do set up XWayland by default, so X11 apps work seamlessly. Secondly, this variation would not apply to the opposite official flavors with different desktops, which nonetheless use X.org. This contains Ubuntu Budgie 25.10, or “Questing Budgie” as we like to consider it – though that taste crew is aiming to be Wayland-only for model 26.04. In flip, the truth that the opposite desktops nonetheless use X11 signifies that all of the X.org packages are nonetheless within the Ubuntu repositories, so you’ll be able to set up GNOME-on-X11 or Plasma-on-X11 classes if you’d like or want them.
On different platforms, there are deeper modifications. The Raspberry Pi version of Ubuntu has a brand new A/B boot mechanism, as described by Dave Jones, Canonical’s boffin for all issues Pi, in a blog post back in July. It additionally defaults to doing a minimal set up. On different Arm64 {hardware}, the brand new common ISO makes use of a new UEFI boot stub, which known as stubble and allows Safe Boot help on some {hardware}, reminiscent of some laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC.
The RISC-V version requires the brand new RVA23S64 ISA profile, which has the slight snag which means for now it solely runs in emulation underneath QEMU. All 9 of the prevailing supported RISC-V boards are caught with Ubuntu 24.04.3 in the interim.
There are some much less seen modifications underneath the hood, reminiscent of new time sync instruments, and the initramfs is now constructed with dracut as a substitute of the outdated initramfs-tools package deal. Modifications like this, and the brand new coreutils and sudo instruments, might be invisible to most customers – however they’ll have an effect on some folks with uncommon configs. That, after all, is why they’re occurring in an interim launch.
The present interim launch, Plucky Puffin, goes finish of life in January – so Plucky customers ought to improve to Questing earlier than then. We called it Pudgy Puffin for its 6 GB ISO dimension, and Questing is barely any smaller: the GNOME variant is a 5.7 GB obtain. It makes use of 1.7 GB of RAM at idle, and takes up 7 GB of disk. The burden achieve would not have an effect on the opposite flavors, although: it is one thing Gnomic.
Questing Quokka will attain the tip of its life in 9 months, in July 2026. ®
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