Hi everyone! As the Stonking Stingray is about to start its majestic underwater flight, it is time to put on our thinking caps, polish our crystal balls, and 🔮Guess the Release! 🔮 What is a release mascot? More than 20 years ago, the very first release of Ubuntu was the Warty Warthog. That’s how the cycle of Ubuntu mascots began! Since then, moving in alphabetical order, we’ve had a mascot for each and every Ubuntu release. But how? By now, some of you might be as...

I have written before about the role that Rust will play in Ubuntu’s future. The case for Rust in 2026 is clear: it gives systems programmers more ergonomic control over performance and resource use while eliminating many classes of memory-safety defects, making it especially useful for software operating at important security boundaries. The harder question is what to do about the enormous amount of mature C code that already exists? Rewrites have long been expensive and risky, and do not o...

Hello again folks, Today I want to talk about some issues you may have noticed in the autopkgtest infrastructure, how we fixed it, and improvements that are shipping soon. What happened? As you may know, we deployed a new iteration of the autopkgtest infrastructure in early May with tests running on LXD-backed containers instead of OpenStack based VMs. This was followed by an extended period of outage where essentially no tests were being run. While we had tested the new testing logic in our s...

Speech To Text is an important accessibility feature, but it’s also a useful productivity tool for anyone who finds it easier to speak than to type. Today I’m excited to introduce Project Myna, a new initiative to bring speech to text dictation to Ubuntu Desktop. Named after the myna bird, known for its ability to mimic human speech, the project aims to deliver a dictation experience that feels like a natural part of the desktop while respecting user privacy and running entirely on local hardwa...

For the more demanding crowd, a coding agent setup only earns its keep when it’s secure (meaning your data doesn’t egress) and safe (neither does it destroy your data). Two things have to be true for that to hold: the AI model has to run locally, and the agent must be isolated so that a stray command can’t wander off across your home directory. On Ubuntu, you don’t need to worry about either case. Here, you will run OpenCode, an open-source, terminal-based AI coding agent, inside a workshop (an...

Hello Ubuntu Desktop community, With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” now shipped and settling in, the Desktop Engineering team is already deep into the next development cycle. Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” arrives in October 2026. While non-LTS releases often focus on delivering new capabilities, they also play another important role: laying the foundation for the next LTS release. Much of the work happening in Ubuntu 26.10 is part of a broader vision for Ubuntu 28.04 LTS. That visi...