The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 26.10, codenamed “Stonking Stingray”.

While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper installer bugs, you will find some bugs within. This image is mostly representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 26.10 is released on October 15, 2026.

Ubuntu Studio 26.10 is a standard release and will be supported for 9 months, until July 2027. We encourage everyone to try this image and report bugs to improve our final release.

Special Notes

The Ubuntu Studio 26.10 disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32 and may not be readable when burned to a DVD. For this reason, we recommend downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.

Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/26.10/beta/

Full updated information, including upgrade instructions, is available in the Release Notes.

Only Install What You Need

A common piece of feedback we hear is that people prefer to start with a lean base and install only the tools they actually use, rather than getting an overwhelming number of pre-installed packages. We hear you.

Ubuntu Studio includes a minimal install option in the installer. This gives you the Ubuntu Studio desktop experience — the theme, the audio configuration, the optimized settings — without the full suite of creative applications. From there, you can use Ubuntu Studio Installer to add exactly the workflows you want: audio, graphics, video, photography, or publishing: à la carte.

Alternatively, if you’re already running Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, or any other official Ubuntu flavor, you don’t have to reinstall at all. Just install the Ubuntu Studio Installer package and pick the components you need. This has always been an option, but we want to make sure everyone knows about it.

The full install remains available for those who want a complete creative workstation out of the box, and that’s a perfectly valid choice too.

New and Improved This Release

Ubuntu Studio 26.10 builds on the 26.04 LTS release with improvements to Ubuntu Studio Installer, Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration, and included creative tools.

• Ubuntu Studio Installer package selection: You can now expand a metapackage’s Depends and Recommends and select individual packages.

• Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration: The app now uses a single-window, tabbed control-panel layout, with PipeWire quantum settings organized on the Audio tab.

• PipeWire settings: The installer offers the PipeWire settings app appropriate to the detected desktop environment.

• Newly-included Audio Applications: Sonic Pi, SuperCollider, JNoise, and the SuperCollider 3 plugin suite are available through Ubuntu Studio’s audio package selections.

Major Package Upgrades

• OBS Studio 32.2.2
• FreeShow 1.6.5 (snap)
• QPrompt 2.0.2
• RaySession 0.18.0
• Patchance 1.4.0
• DistroAV 6.2.1 for NDI support in OBS Studio
• Kdenlive 26.08.1
• Krita 6.0.3
• GIMP 3.2.6
• Ardour 9.8.0
• Scribus 1.6.6
• Audacity 3.7.8

There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to look around the freely-downloadable ISO image.

Known Issues

• You will be prompted, upon first login of any new user, to reboot to apply proper audio configurations for audio production. This is intentional and is a workaround for the installer’s inability to configure the first user as part of the “audio” group or for new users to be added to the audio group automatically.
• Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-studio-26-10-release-notes/
• Further known issues, mostly pertaining to the desktop environment, can be found in the Kubuntu release notes.
• Additionally, the Ubuntu 26.10 release notes contain more generic issues.

How You Can Help

Please test using the test cases on https://tests.ubuntu.com. All you need is a Launchpad account to get started, and to join the Ubuntu QA Team.

Additionally, we need financial contributions. Our project lead, Erich Eickmeyer, is working long hours on this project and trying to generate a part-time income. Go here to see how you can contribute financially (options are also in the sidebar).

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does Ubuntu Studio contain snaps? A: Yes. Mozilla’s distribution agreement with Canonical changed, and Ubuntu was forced to no longer distribute Firefox in a native .deb package. We have found that, after numerous improvements, Firefox now performs just as well as the native .deb package did.

Thunderbird is also a snap in order for the maintainers to get security patches delivered faster. This is done by the Thunderbird team in cooperation with Canonical.

Additionally, FreeShow is an Electron-based application. Electron-based applications cannot be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories in that they cannot be packaged in a traditional Debian source package. While such apps do have a build system to create a .deb binary package, it circumvents the source package build system in Launchpad, which is required when packaging for Ubuntu. However, Electron apps also have a facility for creating snaps, which can be uploaded and included. Therefore, for FreeShow to be included in Ubuntu Studio, it had to be packaged as a snap.

Also, to keep theming consistent, all included themes are snapped in addition to the included .deb versions so that snaps stay consistent with our themes.

We are working with Canonical to make sure that the quality of snaps goes up with each release, so we please ask that you give snaps a chance instead of writing them off completely.

Q: If I install this Beta release, will I have to reinstall when the final release comes out? A: No. If you keep it updated, your installation will automatically become the final release.

Q: Will you make an ISO with {my favorite desktop environment}? A: To do so would require creating an entirely new flavor of Ubuntu, which would require going through the Official Ubuntu Flavor application process. Since we’re completely volunteer-run, we don’t have the time or resources to do this. Instead, we recommend you download the official flavor for the desktop environment of your choice and use Ubuntu Studio Installer to get Ubuntu Studio — which does not convert that flavor to Ubuntu Studio but adds its benefits.

Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine? A: See the “Only Install What You Need” section above. Use the minimal install option and then add only the metapackages, configurations, or individual packages you want with Ubuntu Studio Installer.