As of this week, the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release is powered by the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel series, which will be the default kernel offering for the Questing Quokka series.
Development on Ubuntu 25.10 commenced in late April 2025, shortly after the release of Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin), and it initially shipped with Linux kernel 6.14, which was already backported to the long-term supported Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) series with the release of Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS last month.
Canonical promised a while ago that new Ubuntu releases will always be powered by the latest and greatest kernels, so the latest daily build ISO images are now powered by Linux kernel 6.17, which should boost hardware support for new and existing users.
Linux kernel 6.17 comes with some exciting changes like performance improvements for the Btrfs file system, Intel Wildcat Lake support, support for ARM’s “Branch Record Buffer Extension” (BRBE), and IPv6 force_forwarding sysctl to enable forwarding per interface.
The Linux 6.17 kernel series also ships with better scalability for EXT4 block allocation and support for the AMD hardware feedback interface (HFI). Of course, there will also be new and updated drivers for better hardware support, documentation updates, filesystem and networking enhancements, and many other changes.
Apart from shipping with the latest and greatest Linux 6.17 kernel series, Ubuntu 25.10 will also feature recent GNU/Linux technologies like GCC 15, GNU Binutils 2.45, Python 3.13, LLVM 20, Boost 1.88, and OpenSSL 3.5, as well as the latest Mesa 25.2 graphics stack, and sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo.
Of course, Ubuntu 25.10 will ship with the forthcoming GNOME 49 desktop environment series on the Ubuntu Desktop edition, which re-enables X11 support in the GDM (GNOME Display Manager), Ubuntu’s default login screen, to allow users to use other desktop environments that currently don’t support Wayland.
The beta release of Ubuntu 25.10 is expected next week, on September 18th, while the Release Candidate (RC) milestone is planned for October 2nd, and the final release will hit the streets on October 9th, 2025. Until then, you can download the latest daily build ISO images from the official website.
