Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed "Stonking Stingray," has entered beta ahead of its scheduled October 15 release. The interim release continues Canonical's "oxidization" effort, swapping C-based core utilities for Rust replacements. Notably, stock OpenPGP encryption support now uses Sequoia-PGP, a Rust-based implementation.
The beta also introduces Myna, an optional LLM-powered speech-to-text tool. It is not installed by default and offers a choice of speech-recognition models. The Register's hands-on testing could not exercise it because their test machine was too old, though unofficial setup instructions are available.
According to the review, the beta ran well in both a virtual machine and on bare metal, with only cosmetic missing-icon issues. GNOME 51 adds useful settings such as automatically disabling the trackpad when an external mouse is connected, but drops support for WEP-encrypted Wi-Fi networks. The installer works but has quirks: the window is not resizable, and it ignored a dedicated swap partition during testing. A full installation used about 9 GB of disk space plus 4 GB of swap, and idle RAM usage was around 1.2 GB.