After years of running through workarounds, Wine wrappers, and community AppImages, Linux users finally have something official to hold onto: Canva's Affinity team confirmed today that a native Linux version of its design suite is in active development. No release date has been given, but this is the first time the company has made the commitment on the record.

Why This Matters

Affinity — which includes Photo, Designer, and Publisher — has established itself as the primary professional alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud since Canva acquired the suite in 2022. It's free for personal use, offers one-time purchase pricing for commercial licenses, and runs beautifully on macOS and Windows. The Linux community has been asking for it since day one.

For years the answer was unofficial: a Wine-based AppImage wrapper, maintained by the open-source community, let Linux users install and update Affinity from the official installer. It worked well enough, with quirks around hardware acceleration, UI scaling, and Canva account sign-in. But it was never going to be a long-term solution for professional workflows.

What Was Confirmed (and What Wasn't)

The confirmation came through Affinity's official X account, in response to ongoing community pressure. The message was direct: a Linux version is in development. What it didn't include was a timeline, a technical approach (native build vs. a compatibility layer), or which distributions would be prioritized.

That matters. A Flatpak on Flathub is a very different thing from a .deb in Ubuntu's repository, and "coming to Linux" without that detail leaves a lot of questions open. Still, official acknowledgment is a meaningful step — it moves this from rumor and internal discussion into public commitment.

The Adobe Gap on Linux

Adobe Creative Cloud has never had a native Linux client. Photoshop's one web-based experiment in the browser aside, Adobe has consistently declined to support the platform. That's left a real gap for designers, illustrators, and publishers who work primarily on Linux — a gap that GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus partially fill but have never closed at the professional level.

If Affinity ships a well-executed Linux version, it would represent the first time a professional, commercially-maintained design suite has run natively on a Linux desktop. That's not a small thing. It could shift Affinity's user base meaningfully toward the developer-heavy Linux market, and it would give a concrete answer to every recruiter who's told a Linux-using designer to just use a Mac.

What to Expect Next

Given that no date was announced, it's reasonable to assume this is at least several months away — possibly longer. The complexity of building a native Linux app that handles GPU acceleration, file system dialogs, font rendering, and Canva account integration across multiple distributions is significant. System76 and Collabora have shown it can be done; Affinity's engineering team will have its own path to navigate.

For now, the message from Canva is clear: they're working on it. That's more than Linux users have had before. Keep an eye on the OMG! Ubuntu coverage for updates as the story develops.

Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed "Stonking Stingray," landed on October 15, 2026, and it's one of the more substantive interim releases in years. The headline change is a full migration to Rust-based core utilities — but the release packs in enough other improvements to be worth a look even if you're running the April LTS.

Rust Coreutils Are Now the Default

The biggest shift in 26.10 is completing the migration to uutils, the Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils. The last holdouts — cp, mv, and rm — have now been replaced. That means every standard command-line file operation runs on a Rust implementation, not the decades-old GNU C code.

For most users, this is invisible. The commands behave identically. What changes is underneath: Rust's memory safety guarantees eliminate an entire class of potential vulnerabilities in tools that touch every file on your system. It also aligns Ubuntu with a broader Linux ecosystem trend; Canonical has been steadily pushing Rust into core components for the past two releases.

Also landing in the main archive is Sequoia PGP, a Rust-based OpenPGP implementation built by former GnuPG developers, as a modern alternative to the aging GnuPG stack.

GNOME 51 and the New Desktop Experience

26.10 ships with GNOME 51, which brings a refined tiling assistant plugin out of the box, making it easier to snap windows into layouts without third-party extensions. It's not i3, but it's a meaningful improvement for keyboard-focused workflows.

The system also adds Myna, an opt-in, locally processed speech-to-text feature. Locally processed means nothing leaves your machine — which is a refreshing design choice in an era where every dictation feature seems to phone home.

Kernel 7.3 and Hardware Support

Linux kernel 7.3 is on board, landing with improved support for recent Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops. That's relevant for anyone running Ubuntu on ARM-based hardware — a category that's grown significantly over the past year. The release also includes the first chunk of Valve engineer Natalie Vock's VRAM overcommit work, a useful addition for gaming on Linux with discrete GPUs.

New RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images round out the hardware coverage, signaling that Canonical is taking non-x86 architectures seriously.

The Usual Caveats

26.10 is an interim release: nine months of support, ending July 2027. If you need long-term stability, 26.04 LTS is still the right call. But if you want the latest GNOME, the Rust coreutils migration, and better Snapdragon support right now, Stonking Stingray is a solid upgrade for non-production machines.

Downloads are available from the official Ubuntu website. The upgrade path from 26.04 is open and should be straightforward for most setups.

On October 24th, 2026, systemd merged optional Rust support for new components — a milestone that has been debated in the Linux community for years. The change doesn't rewrite systemd in Rust; it allows new components to be authored in Rust alongside the existing C codebase, keeping backward compatibility intact while opening the door to memory-safe code for new subsystems.

Why systemd Matters Here

systemd is the init system and service manager at the core of most major Linux distributions — Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch, and others. It starts your system, manages your services, logs your events, and handles network configuration. Because it runs as PID 1 with full root privileges from boot, any memory safety bug in systemd has the potential to compromise the entire system.

Rust prevents the class of bugs — buffer overflows, use-after-free errors, null pointer dereferences — that account for the majority of exploitable security vulnerabilities in C and C++ code. The Linux kernel began accepting Rust code in 2022, and projects like curl, sudo, and several core utilities have since added Rust components. systemd has been one of the most high-profile holdouts, making this merge a meaningful step forward for the Linux ecosystem's memory safety story.

What Actually Changes

The architecture stays the same. Existing C code remains untouched, and Rust support is opt-in at build time. The change enables new components to be authored in Rust from the start rather than requiring contributors to write C. The first Rust-authored components are expected to appear in newer, less-established parts of the codebase where regression risk is low.

This mirrors the approach taken by the Linux kernel team: introduce Rust support, start with peripheral subsystems, and expand coverage as tooling matures and contributor familiarity grows. The systemd team explicitly chose not to port existing C code — the focus is on new additions only.

Why the Debate Took So Long

systemd's lead developers had been cautious about Rust for years, citing build system complexity and the additional toolchain dependency as reasons to hold off. The Rust toolchain is a non-trivial requirement for distributions that need to build systemd from source — adding it affects every downstream maintainer. The decision to merge suggests those concerns were resolved to the team's satisfaction, or at least weighed against the security benefits and found acceptable.

The Long Game

For users, the practical impact will take time to appear. Nothing changes visibly right now. What's happening is infrastructure investment: making it possible for the next generation of systemd contributors to write safer code from the start, gradually pushing memory-safety guarantees deeper into the Linux boot and service stack. Given how central systemd is to the entire Linux ecosystem, that's an investment worth watching.

KDE turned 30 on October 14, 2026, and the project marked the occasion with a practical gift to itself: shipping Plasma 6.8 and finally cutting the X11 session loose. The release is out now for major distributions. After decades of parallel support, Wayland is now the only session type the desktop environment officially maintains.

What Changed

KDE Plasma no longer offers an X11 session option at login. When you start a Plasma desktop session, Wayland is your only choice. This isn't a surprise — KDE announced the plan months in advance — but it draws a firm line in the sand for a display technology that has been the backbone of Linux graphical computing for more than three decades. X11 itself dates back to 1984.

XWayland Keeps Legacy Apps Running

The important nuance: removing the X11 session is not the same as removing X11 support entirely. Applications that depend on X11 protocols still run through XWayland, the compatibility layer built into the Wayland stack. Screen sharing, older games, and apps that haven't ported to native Wayland will generally keep working. The change affects what runs the desktop session, not every app that touches the display.

KDE's Own Apps Stay X11-Compatible

KDE applications — Dolphin, Konsole, Kate, and the rest — will continue to work on X11 for the foreseeable future. The project is retiring the Plasma desktop session, not the application toolkit. If you're running KDE apps on another desktop environment over X11, nothing breaks.

A Runway for Holdouts

KDE is not abandoning X11 users cold. The project plans to support the Plasma X11 session through early 2027 for users still on Plasma 6.7. After that, distributions with long-term support commitments — Alma Linux is one example — intend to carry Plasma X11 compatibility until 2032. Enterprise users with hard dependencies have a path forward, just not through the upstream KDE project.

GNOME Already Made This Move

KDE isn't the first major Linux desktop to drop X11 sessions. GNOME removed X11 session support in GNOME 47. Now KDE follows. With both of the two dominant Linux desktop environments committed to Wayland-only sessions, the era of X11 as a first-class option for desktop Linux is over in practice — even if distributions maintain it in custom configurations for years to come.

Why Wayland Wins

Wayland brings genuine improvements: better security isolation between applications, smoother multi-monitor support, working fractional scaling on HiDPI displays, and a significantly simpler architecture. Every practical advantage has been on Wayland's side for years. The friction has been legacy app compatibility and inertia — and Plasma 6.8 decides both of those are no longer a reason to maintain a parallel session type in the upstream project.

KDE Plasma 6.8 is available now through your distribution's package repositories.

Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" landed on October 15, 2026, and it's a meaningful release — not a blockbuster, but a clean consolidation of work that's been brewing across the Linux stack for a while.

The Rust migration is done

The headline change is one that most users won't directly notice but that matters for the long term: Ubuntu 26.10 completes the migration of core utilities to Rust. The commands you use constantly — cp, mv, rm — now come from the uutils Rust implementation instead of GNU coreutils. The Rust toolchain is at version 1.97. This shift improves memory safety and sets the stage for a base that's easier to audit.

Linux 7.3 and GNOME 51

The release ships with Linux 7.3 (technically built from rc6 because the final 7.3 tag landed after Ubuntu's release date). New hardware support includes Intel Xe3P (Nova Lake), AMD Zen 6, and NVIDIA 615.x drivers. Paired with Mesa 26.2, that covers most modern GPU configurations out of the box.

GNOME 51 brings smoother animations, better multi-monitor handling — including persistent brightness settings and HDR toggling between displays — and general responsiveness improvements. Nothing revolutionary, but the desktop feels more polished to work with.

On-device speech-to-text with Myna

A quieter addition: Ubuntu 26.10 introduces Myna, an opt-in speech-to-text agent that runs entirely on-device using local LLMs. No audio leaves your machine. It's early software, but the direction is clear: Canonical wants privacy-respecting AI features as part of the base desktop, not bolted on by a third-party app.

RISC-V desktop images

Ubuntu 26.10 is the first release to ship official RISC-V desktop images, alongside new optimized amd64v3 install images. For anyone tracking RISC-V hardware development, this is a real milestone — a mainstream distro treating the architecture as a first-class desktop target.

Ubuntu 26.10 gets nine months of support, through July 2027. It follows Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, which remains the recommended choice for stability. But if you want the newest kernel, a fully Rust core, and GNOME 51 today, Stonking Stingray is ready to download.

Canonical shipped Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" on October 15, 2026. It is an interim release supported until July 2027, but it packs more meaningful changes than most interim cycles — particularly around security foundations and a long-running project to swap the C-based Unix core for Rust.

The Rust migration is complete

The headline change is the completion of Ubuntu's move to Rust-based uutils coreutils. Previous releases had already swapped in Rust replacements for findutils, diffutils, and sudo (via sudo-rs), but 26.10 closes the loop on coreutils itself — the bundle of commands like ls, cp, chmod, and cat that underpin nearly every shell script on the planet. The switch brings memory safety guarantees to tools that have existed since the early Unix era. For most users this is invisible; for security teams it removes an entire class of potential vulnerabilities from the base system.

GNOME 51, dbus-broker, and a new kernel

The desktop lands on GNOME 51, which adds automatic screen rotation on devices with an accelerometer, DNS search domain support in Network Settings, and smart card and Kerberos support inside Remote Desktop. The kernel is Linux 7.3 (technically 7.3.0-9.9, built from a release candidate because the final upstream 7.3 arrived after the freeze). Ubuntu also replaced the legacy dbus-daemon with dbus-broker as the default D-Bus implementation — a quieter change that improves reliability and startup performance on systems with many services.

Post-quantum package signing

One of the more forward-looking additions is post-quantum-ready package signing. All packages in the Ubuntu archive now carry signatures using algorithms designed to resist attacks from future quantum computers. This does not protect against threats today, but it future-proofs the chain of trust for machines that will still be running Ubuntu when quantum hardware matures. The change is transparent to users: apt verifies the new signatures automatically.

Myna: on-device speech-to-text

Ubuntu 26.10 also ships a preview of Myna, an opt-in local speech-to-text engine. Unlike cloud-based transcription, Myna processes audio entirely on the device, which matters for anyone handling sensitive conversations or working in air-gapped environments. The preview supports a limited set of languages; broader language support is expected in future releases.

Ten flavors, one download page

All ten official Ubuntu flavors — including Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu, and the rest — are available from the standard download page. If you are on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS or 26.10's predecessor and want a stable daily driver without chasing interim releases, there is no urgency to upgrade now — the next LTS is on track for April 2028. But if you want Rust coreutils, GNOME 51, and quantum-safe apt today, Stonking Stingray delivers them.

Firefox 159 is now in beta, arriving roughly two weeks before its planned stable release on October 27, 2026. The update is modest in scope but addresses a genuinely irritating issue for Linux users and adds several features that smooth the daily browsing experience.

The Wayland fix that's been a long time coming

The headline Linux improvement is a fix for tab detachment on Wayland. In affected versions, clicking a tab in certain conditions caused it to tear off into a new window — an interaction ghost that broke workflow and left users managing unintended windows they didn't ask for. The behavior has been a standing complaint in Firefox's bug tracker; 159 resolves it.

Wayland is now the default display server for most major Linux distributions, including Fedora and Ubuntu. With KDE Plasma 6.8 shipping a Wayland-only default desktop just yesterday, the pressure to get Firefox behavior right on Wayland is only increasing. The fix arrives at exactly the right moment.

New features across platforms

Beyond the Wayland fix, Firefox 159 adds several quality-of-life improvements:

• Chrome bookmark import from Google profiles — users signed into Google can pull bookmarks directly into Firefox without exporting files manually. This removes the main friction point for users switching from Chrome.
• Keyboard shortcut for searching open tabs — a faster way to locate a tab when you have many open at once.
• Improved menu and panel visuals — cosmetic updates on Linux and Windows that make the interface feel more consistent.
• Sidebar password access — saved passwords are now reachable from the sidebar by default, cutting down the menu-diving required to autofill on non-standard sites.

Stable release: October 27

The developer release notes on MDN are still marked as a work in progress for this version, so additional features may be disclosed closer to the stable ship date.

Mozilla has been shipping steady, incremental improvements through each Firefox release this year — no single version since the major 157 visual overhaul has carried a transformative change, but the cumulative polish is noticeable. The Wayland tab fix in 159 is representative of that philosophy: unglamorous work that matters to the people affected by it.

On October 14, 2026 — KDE's 30th anniversary — the project ships Plasma 6.8, the latest major update to its Linux desktop environment. Final polishing is in progress, and as of October 10 only four regression reports remain open: a sign the release is about as stable as a beta can be.

Union Theming: The Big Feature

The headline addition is the Union theming system, which brings Plasma's visual style to classic QtWidgets applications like Dolphin and Kate. For years, those apps looked like holdovers from an earlier era of the KDE desktop — their controls using a different rendering path than the rest of Plasma. Union begins to fix that.

The team is shipping it as a technology preview, with some visual inconsistencies expected. Calling it a preview is honest: the underlying issue is decades of code that never anticipated this kind of unified theming. Getting it right for all edge cases will take additional releases.

Kup Becomes Official, RDP Gets Clipboard

Kup, a backup scheduler for Plasma, is being promoted from a third-party extra to an official part of the desktop. It's a practical addition for anyone who hasn't set up regular backups — which is most people.

KDE's built-in remote desktop implementation gains bidirectional clipboard support over RDP. Copy something on your remote machine, paste it locally, and vice versa — a small quality-of-life improvement that anyone using Plasma's remote desktop will notice immediately.

Wayland Transition Complete

Plasma 6.8 marks the completion of KDE's move to Wayland-only as the primary display backend. X11 support isn't gone, but the team is formally shifting its focus. For most hardware combinations this has been transparent for months — but it's a significant architectural milestone.

A late fix addresses an issue where tiling windows caused lag and stuttering for users on certain NVIDIA proprietary drivers. That fix lands in 6.8.

A 30-Year Milestone

KDE was founded on October 14, 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who wanted a consistent, usable desktop environment for Unix systems. Three decades later, Plasma is the most feature-rich open desktop environment available, running on everything from standard PCs to Steam Deck-adjacent handhelds.

Plasma 6.8 will be available through your distribution's package manager or directly from the KDE download page.

Sources

• Linuxiac — KDE Plasma 6.8 Gets Final Fixes Ahead of October 14 Release
• Linuxiac — KDE Plasma 6.8: Here's What's Coming
• LinuxCompatible — KDE Plasma 6.8 Ships October 14 for KDE's 30th Anniversary

System76 released COSMIC Epoch 1.10 on October 8, 2026, two weeks after version 1.9. The headline change is straightforward but significant: the COSMIC Launcher now uses GPU-accelerated rendering by default, powered by WGPU.

Earlier builds of the Launcher used a software renderer that performed badly on many systems — users reported scroll rates dropping to roughly 1 frame per second on hardware that should have had no trouble. That problem is now fixed at the source rather than worked around.

What's New in 1.10

Beyond the Launcher, the release includes a handful of quality-of-life improvements across the desktop:

• Drawing tablet support: Tablets can now be mapped to specific displays in a multi-monitor setup, which was a notable gap for artists and designers who use COSMIC on workstations.
• cosmic-store screenshot gallery: The app store viewer now shows screenshot galleries and caches preview images, making it easier to evaluate software before installing.
• Terminal tab movement: The COSMIC Terminal gained keyboard-driven tab reordering, a small but frequently requested feature from power users.
• Compositor cursor auto-hide: The cursor now hides automatically while you're typing, reducing distraction during text-heavy work. The implementation was overhauled from an earlier version that had timing issues.
• Cleaner initial setup: The WiFi configuration page in the setup wizard no longer appears on systems without a WiFi adapter, which was a source of confusion on desktop machines.

Where COSMIC Stands

COSMIC is System76's Rust-based desktop environment, built as a replacement for GNOME on their Pop!_OS distribution. It hit its 1.0 release earlier this year and has been shipping incremental updates on a roughly two-week cadence since then.

The project is notable for being one of the few serious attempts to build a Linux desktop environment entirely in Rust, and for its strict contributor policies — including a ban on LLM-generated code contributions that System76 announced in early October. The team argues that AI-generated contributions tend to introduce subtle bugs and shift maintenance burden onto human reviewers without providing proportional value.

The GPU-rendering fix in 1.10 addresses one of the more visible rough edges that users noticed after the 1.0 launch. The two-week release cadence means issues that would have waited months for a fix in a more traditional distribution cycle are being resolved continuously. For users on Pop!_OS who switched to COSMIC at 1.0, version 1.10 is a worthwhile update.

OpenSSH 10.6 shipped on October 6, 2026, and it closes a compression-related side-channel that has been lurking in SSH implementations for decades, while also pushing forward on post-quantum cryptography. For anyone running servers or managing infrastructure, this is a meaningful update worth deploying promptly.

The Compression Flaw

The headline security fix is the removal of the LZ77 dictionary coder used for SSH compression. LZ77-based compression is vulnerable to a chosen-plaintext side-channel attack: when attacker-controlled data and secret data share the same compression context, observable differences in compressed size can leak information about the secret data. This class of attack — sometimes called CRIME or BREACH in the TLS world — has been known since at least 2002, but SSH compression remained enabled as an option in many deployments. OpenSSH 10.6 disables it entirely rather than leaving it as a footgun for administrators to misconfigure.

SFTP also gets tighter path validation to prevent a malicious server from using recursive copy operations to write files outside the intended destination directory — a traversal-style bug that affected some copy workflows.

Post-Quantum Cryptography Moves Forward

OpenSSH 10.6 enables the hybrid post-quantum signature algorithm ssh-mldsa44-ed25519 by default. This pairs the ML-DSA lattice-based algorithm (standardized by NIST in 2024) with the established Ed25519 for a hybrid scheme that is secure if either algorithm holds — defense in depth against a future cryptographically-relevant quantum computer.

The server also gains a new WarnWeakCrypto option, enabled by default, which logs connections using key exchange methods that aren't considered post-quantum safe. This gives administrators visibility into clients still negotiating classical-only key exchanges, which is particularly useful in environments beginning a migration to quantum-resistant cryptography.

Quality-of-Life Changes

The release notes list a few smaller but welcome additions: SFTP now supports mkdir -p for recursive directory creation (something that required workarounds before), and ChannelTimeout now accepts fractional-second values for finer-grained control over idle connection handling. Usernames supplied directly on the ssh command line can no longer contain $ or \, reducing shell-injection risks in setups using ProxyCommand or Match exec.

Faster Release Cadence Going Forward

The project noted that it expects to move to more frequent releases rather than batching fixes until the next planned major version. This is a welcome shift — OpenSSH occupies such critical infrastructure that sitting on security fixes for months to maintain a stable release schedule has real costs. Shorter cycles mean patches reach users faster.

Should You Update?

Yes, and soon. The compression side-channel fix alone is reason enough, particularly for deployments where SSH compression is enabled and external parties can influence any portion of the encrypted traffic. The post-quantum additions are forward-looking rather than urgent — no cryptographically-relevant quantum computer exists yet — but they're increasingly relevant as organizations begin planning quantum-resistant infrastructure. Most major Linux distributions will have packages available within days of the upstream release.

Starting tomorrow, October 7, the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2026 opens in Prague, running through October 9 at the Prague Congress Centre. The timing isn't coincidental — this year marks Linux's 35th anniversary, and the Linux Foundation has designed the event around that milestone.

Linus Torvalds in Prague

The centerpiece is a featured conversation with Linus Torvalds, creator of both Linux and Git. Torvalds has been a fixture at Open Source Summit Europe for years, but the 35th anniversary framing gives this year's conversation added weight. Expect questions about where Linux goes from here — particularly as AI workloads increasingly run on Linux infrastructure, and as concerns about LLM-generated code contaminating open source projects have become a live debate in the community.

That second point is no abstraction right now. Last week, System76 publicly banned LLM-generated code from COSMIC Desktop contributions, citing quality and legal concerns. And separately, the PS5 Linux maintainer cited a flood of unreviewed AI-generated pull requests as a reason for stepping back from the project. Torvalds has strong opinions on code quality; his take will likely be the most-shared sound bite from the event.

Session Tracks

Beyond the keynote, the schedule covers open AI and data infrastructure, digital trust, safety-critical embedded Linux, cloud-native orchestration, and a dedicated Embedded Linux Conference track for systems developers working on hardware. The Linux Foundation has been pushing the "open AI" framing hard — positioning open models and open infrastructure as counterweights to centralized AI development.

Several satellite events run alongside the main summit: the Observability Summit Europe ran October 5, the Linux Foundation Member European Forum is today (October 6), and the Valkey Contributor Summit — focused on the Redis fork that emerged after Redis changed its license — also runs today.

Linux at 35

Linux 1.0 shipped in March 1994, but Torvalds announced the project on August 25, 1991 with his famous Usenet post. Depending on how you count, the kernel is either 32 or 35 years old — the community has settled on 35. The codebase that Torvalds called "just a hobby, won't be big and professional" now powers most of the world's servers, all Android devices, the majority of cloud infrastructure, and increasingly, the AI training hardware that defines where computing goes next.

The Prague summit runs October 7–9. The Linux Foundation is livestreaming select keynotes for those who can't attend in person.

System76's COSMIC desktop project updated its contribution rules on October 2, 2026, and the change is blunt: pull requests that include any LLM-generated content — source code, comments, or even PR descriptions — will no longer be accepted.

The new policy goes further than simple disclosure. It's an outright ban. Contributors are now required to confirm that nothing in their submission was generated by a large language model before a pull request can be merged.

Why the Ban?

COSMIC lead developer Jeremy Soller of System76 explained the reasoning publicly: the project was being swamped. LLMs have made it trivially easy for first-time contributors to generate plausible-looking code and submit it — but plausible-looking is not the same as correct, aligned with the project's architecture, or planned by the maintainers.

According to Soller, the flood of LLM-generated submissions was "unplanned and rarely accepted," but reviewing them placed a real burden on the small core team. The volume was straining maintainers to the point of unsustainability.

A Pattern Across Open Source

COSMIC isn't the first open source project to encounter this problem, but it may be one of the most prominent to draw a hard line. The project is written in Rust, targets a technically demanding domain — a full Wayland-based desktop environment built from scratch — and has a lean maintainer team. All three factors make low-quality submissions especially costly to process.

Other projects have adopted disclosure requirements or AI-contribution labels. COSMIC's approach is more aggressive: no LLM output, full stop. The policy applies to code, inline comments, and the PR description itself.

One Exception

The ban doesn't extend to the cosmic-flatpak repository, where upstream projects manage their own Flatpak manifests. The COSMIC team reviews those primarily for sandboxing compliance, making the context different enough to warrant separate treatment.

What This Signals

This is a real tension playing out across open source right now. AI tools make contribution easier — but the review cost doesn't disappear just because the code was generated cheaply. If anything, low-effort AI submissions shift cost from the contributor to the maintainer. COSMIC's ban is one data point on how projects with limited bandwidth plan to navigate that tradeoff: drawing a bright line and enforcing it, rather than trying to evaluate AI-generated code case by case.

Ubuntu's newest beta, codenamed "Stonking Stingray," landed on October 1st, 2026 — a few days behind schedule due to infrastructure issues, but worth the wait. "Stonking" is British slang for something impressively large or excellent, a fitting name for a release that ships several meaningful upgrades.

What's New

The headliner is a complete migration to Rust coreutils via the uutils project. Every standard Unix utility you've long relied on — ls, cp, cat, sort — now runs on a memory-safe Rust implementation by default. For most users this will be invisible; for system security, it's a meaningful shift that eliminates an entire category of memory-safety bugs from the base layer.

Ubuntu 26.10 also ships Linux 7.3 (still in release-candidate phase, but included for beta testing), GNOME 51 — the same desktop that debuted in Fedora 45 with passkey login and offline maps — and Mesa 26.2 for improved graphics driver support. The session bus switches from dbus-daemon to dbus-broker for better performance and reliability. WSL and cloud images are part of the beta cycle as well.

Release Schedule

According to the official release schedule, the Release Candidate lands October 8th, and the final release of Ubuntu 26.10 is set for October 15th, 2026. The Canonical team describes the beta as "reasonably free of showstopper image build or installer bugs" — solid enough to test in a VM, not yet recommended as a daily driver.

Why It Matters

26.10 is an interim release, not an LTS. But it's the last non-LTS before the 28.04 LTS cycle, making it a preview of where Canonical is taking Ubuntu for the next several years. The Rust coreutils landing here as stable defaults signals that the 28.04 LTS will almost certainly ship them to hundreds of millions of users.

If you're on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or 26.04.1 "Resolute Raccoon," this beta won't touch your system — but it's worth watching. Download the Ubuntu 26.10 beta images and file bugs now if you want to help shape what ships in two weeks.

Canonical quietly flipped the switch on September 29, 2026: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users can now officially upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS, codenamed "Resolute Raccoon," directly from the desktop. Linuxiac confirmed the upgrade path is live, with no command-line workarounds needed.

Why It Took Until the Point Release

Canonical traditionally holds back the LTS-to-LTS upgrade prompt until the first point release (.1). The delay allows the most critical post-launch bugs to get patched before exposing the broader LTS audience—who tend to be on stable, production systems—to the new release. Ubuntu 26.04.1 already incorporates all security patches, bug fixes, and package updates shipped since April's initial launch, making it a meaningfully more stable upgrade target than 26.04.0 was.

How to Upgrade

Desktop users on Ubuntu 24.04 will start seeing an upgrade notification through Software Updater automatically. The prompt reads: "Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available (you have 24.04)", with a single Upgrade button. If you don't want to wait for the prompt, you can trigger the upgrade manually:

sudo do-release-upgrade

Before starting, Canonical recommends following these pre-upgrade steps: back up important files, run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade to make sure 24.04 is fully current, and ensure the system has several gigabytes of free disk space available.

What's in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" ships with GNOME 48, Linux kernel 6.14, improved Snap performance, and a refreshed installer experience. Standard LTS support runs through May 2031, with extended security maintenance available to Ubuntu Pro subscribers through 2036.

Gradual Rollout

Canonical is pushing the upgrade prompt out progressively over the coming days, so if you don't see it immediately, that's by design—not a sign that anything is wrong. This phased approach lets Canonical monitor upgrade telemetry and catch any widespread issues before they reach the full 24.04 LTS user base.

For Ubuntu 24.04 users who've been waiting for a stable, officially-blessed path forward, that path is open now.

System76's COSMIC desktop environment — the Rust-built, System76-sponsored alternative to GNOME that ships with Pop!_OS — released version 1.9 on September 24, 2026. The update is incremental by design: COSMIC is still working toward a stable baseline, so each release focuses on closing specific gaps rather than introducing sweeping architectural changes.

This release closes two visible ones.

COSMIC Viewer is the desktop's new native image viewer. Phoronix's coverage of the release notes that it handles a wide range of image formats and includes built-in editing capabilities — making it a practical replacement for the grab-bag of third-party image tools users had been relying on. For a desktop that aims to ship as a complete, coherent system rather than a shell with plugins, shipping a native image viewer matters.

COSMIC OSK is a new on-screen keyboard that supports both touch and gamepad input. This extends COSMIC's usability to tablet-like configurations and couch setups that were previously awkward without a physical keyboard. Gamepad input support in particular is a nod toward the Steam Deck-adjacent use cases that the Pop!_OS user base skews toward.

The release also revamps the COSMIC Store to display developer attribution more prominently for each app and applet. It's a small UX improvement, but one that signals attention to the details that make a software ecosystem feel trustworthy rather than anonymous.

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS users already have the update available through the system updater. Rolling-release distributions — Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CachyOS — should see COSMIC 1.9 packages land in their repositories shortly after the announcement.

COSMIC's development cadence has been consistent. The team ships frequently, keeps each release focused on specific goals, and communicates clearly about what's in and what isn't. The desktop isn't finished — there are still rough edges, apps that don't exist yet, and integration work ahead — but 1.9 is another concrete step toward something that looks increasingly like a complete, independent Linux desktop, not just a promising experiment.

The bigger picture: COSMIC represents a genuine alternative approach to building a Linux desktop. Where most desktop environments build on GTK or Qt and C-family languages, COSMIC is written entirely in Rust and uses a custom widget toolkit (iced). That's a significant long-term investment by System76, and releases like 1.9 are the evidence that it's paying off incrementally. Linuxiac's coverage has a solid rundown of the full changelog if you want the details beyond the headline features.