An Atlanta resident, Samuel Tunick, is fighting a federal indictment that treats a privacy feature on his phone as evidence destruction. A grand jury charged him under 18 U.S.C. § 2232(a), a statute that covers destruction of property to block seizure by a government agent.
The root cause of all this was the deletion of a Google Pixel smartphone's contents during a border search, and the case itself sits in the Northern District of Georgia under case number 1:25-CR-499, before District Judge Eleanor L. Ross.
If Tunick is found guilty, the charge carries a fine, up to five years in prison, or both.
The coercion
On January 24 last year, the CBP placed Tunick into secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic, putting him through several rounds of questioning and searches.
The officers started off by searching him, checking what he was carrying, and demanding that he fork over the passcode for his phone. All of this was reportedly done under the pretext of searching for CSAM.
He also asked for a lawyer multiple times, but the officers ignored every request, never read him his Miranda rights, and kept questioning him anyway. When he pushed back, they said it was "a whole different ballgame" at the border and that they didn't need a warrant.
Tunick eventually handed over a passcode.
But, the moment it was entered, the screen flickered blank a few times before the device rebooted itself, erasing its contents in front of the same agents who'd demanded access.
Earlier, a Homeland Security agent had circulated Tunick's name and photo hours before his flight landed, flagging him for suspected terrorism activity, while FBI and CBP officers coordinated to set up the search.
Despite that, the government has never presented evidence tying Tunick to an actual crime connected to the movement.
What triggered this?
Tunick had what appears to be GrapheneOS's duress PIN/Password feature set up on his phone. When officers entered the passcode he gave them, it did what it was designed to do, wiping the device the moment the duress code was entered.
If you didn't know, this feature also triggers at any authentication prompt, not just the lockscreen, and covers every profile on the phone, not only the main one.
In a forum post that reads like a reaction to this case (though they never name it), GrapheneOS said people should carefully think through how they use the duress feature. And that wiping a device in an actual duress situation can carry physical or legal consequences of its own.
Guilty as charged?
Nope! Nothing's decided yet. A hearing on Tunick's suppression motion happened earlier this month, but the judge kept it open for more testimony before ruling on anything.
Written arguments are due through the fall, Tunick's side by September 18, the government's by October 9, and Tunick's reply by October 23. Until then, know that the five-year prison term attached to the charge is just the maximum the law allows, not what's actually coming his way.
As for my views, hearing about a citizen of a country getting worked over like this just to come home, only for it to end in a federal indictment months later feels like something you'd expect from a banana republic.
But that's how things go in the greatest nation in the world /s.
It makes you wonder how worthless the rights of the average Joe are, while people committing crimes that make your blood boil walk free. 🙃
From the Git repo's README to blogs, Markdown is everywhere in the tech world in general.
I have been using Markdown for years. That's what I use for writing the articles here. While I often write directly in the CMS, I also manage personal notes, drafts and work on documentation in dedicated Markdown editors on my computer.
Recently, I came across a new Markdown editor called Ferrite. I tried and found that it mentions all the features I wanted:
Folder view
Dual pane
Focused view
Editor tool bar
Git status
Built-in terminal
There are many more features, like code folding, syntax highlights, mini-map overviews, diagrams, and more.
Basically, Ferrite is like an IDE but for Markdown (or should I say text) files.
🚧
It was later that I realized that the project, though open source, is 100% coded with AI. Read their AI workflow details here. I'm adding this disclaimer because whether to use AI-generated code is a matter of principle for a lot of you.
Meet Ferrite, Markdown editor for developers
Written in Rust, Ferrite a text editor primarily for Markdown but with good support for JSON, YAML, and TOML files. Basically, various text files developers and devops deal with.
For markdown file, you can view it in raw mode (with synax), rendered view (only shows rendered markdown), and split view (shows raw text and rendered view side by side).
For other files, it just displays them with a mini-map overview and highlighted syntax.
There is zen mode for focused work.
Zen mode removes nice to let you focus on the text
Ferrite also allows you to create flowcharts, wire diagrams, mind maps etc.
In fact, Ferrite has a huge list of features. You can export files as PDF and HTML, run shell and Python codes from the editor itself, has a command palette, supports Wikilinks, can view PDF and CSV files and much more.
Basically, it's a Markdown editor specially created for developers.
Why I liked it
Lately, I found myself in situations where I had to edit technical documentation hosted on GitHub. The flow is standard. I fork the repo, clone it on my system, checkout to a new branch, make my changes, push it to my forked repo and then create a pull request to the upstream branch.
This is the usual code contribution flow, applies to collaborative documentation, too.
Now, since this is a dev-like workflow, a text editor that behaves like IDE is perfectly suited for this.
Built in terminal is useful for my workflow
Ferrite's built-in terminal gives me instant access to the command line for quick commit and push. It also shows the locally modified files if you are in a git repo.
For this kind of workflow, though I could use VS Code with extensions, it's an overkill. And I prefer to separate code and text files.
I used Ghostwriter, but it's a simple Markdown editor and I found myself switching between tools. This is when I came across Ferrite and it looked like it could be the perfect fit as it ticked (almost) all the checkboxes for me.
It's not perfect
Like most things in life, Ferrite is not perfect as well. I came across a few quirks after regularly using it for the past few days.
There is a dedicated button to sync the raw and rendered views when you are in the split view mode. This way you should be able to scroll on one side and see the impact on the side pane.
This feature works, but not perfectly. There is a lag that cannot be unnoticed.
0:00
/0:03
Sync issue between raw and rendered views
Then, it doesn't display images in the rendered view. This is a huge disappointment for me.
Take a look at the screenshot below:
Ferrite cannot display images?
I understand that relative path is crucial for image display in Markdown. But those paths were correct and the image was displayed properly in the Ghostwriter editor:
Ghostwriter displays the images correctly
Also, Ferrite has way too many features. It's like an IDE and if you have ever used an IDE you would know that IDE gradually become too complex with all kinds of settings and tweaks and busy interface.
Sometimes, simplicity also becomes a feature.
Should I use it or not?
Frankly, I did not notice the "100% AI developed" when I started using Ferrite last week. I liked what I saw, used it and fit very well for my current needs. I made notes, something I often do when I try a new tool, so that I can write articles and reviews on those tools later.
And when I started writing this article and went through the details, I learned that the project mentions explicitly that it is fully developed with AI.
That puts me in a dilemma. On one hand, it seems like a good piece of software. 1.7K GitHub stars are proof of its popularity. On the other hand, "100% AI" label is kind of offputting.
OpenUK recently published its AI Openness report, and buried inside the 40-page document is a big ask from the UK government. Build Britain its own foundation that holds code, governance, and standards the way the Linux Foundation (LF) does in the US.
If you are hearing that name for the first time, OpenUK is a UK-based (obviously) non-profit that advocates for open technology and is led by Amanda Brock. They first put out this call in a report titled "Making the UK the Home of Open Source," which was submitted to UKRI earlier this year.
The AI Openness report restates the case with added urgency this time.
The ask
Characterizing the proposed British flavor of LF as a National Foundation, the body, once formed, would hold repositories, standards, and datasets built with UK public money rather than watch that work migrate to servers and governance boards based elsewhere.
It would also handle training, community engagement, and event organizing. Those are areas that would otherwise need separate infrastructure, like an open source program office (OSPO) and a sovereign fund.
OpenUK frames this as a funding and governance gap more than a technology one.
They note that the UK ranks as Europe's top country in open source software and AI openness, yet it has no equivalent to the Linux Foundation, Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency, or China's Open Atom Foundation to show for it.
UK is bleeding open source
The non-profit didn't have to look far to prove its point, as MCP is the group's strongest example.
The Model Context Protocol, now the standard behind how AI models connect to outside tools and data, was created by two engineers in London. Anthropic backed the protocol and eventually donated it to LF's Agentic AI Foundation, alongside Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md specification.
In conversation with OpenUK, David Soria Parra, one of MCP's co-creators, said that they gave MCP away because they needed the standard to stay vendor neutral, free of trademark and licensing risk.
If the UK had an established foundation, then they wouldn't have lost MCP to the US. 🙃
Not the only ones
The European Commission has already shown off an initiativeto break free from US tech dominance by moving towards an open European digital ecosystem. It would cover fields like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, open hardware, internet technologies, and industrial applications like automotive and manufacturing.
Germany is closer to what OpenUK wants for the UK. Its Sovereign Tech Fund has turned into a government agency, and the report calls that "the right direction."
China has already proven the model works. Open source became a national pillar under its 14th Five-Year Plan, supported by a dedicated foundation called the Open Atom Foundation.
DeepSeek’s R1 showed how that focus pays off, leveraging open-weights and knowledge distillation to deliver frontier-level AI at a fraction of the cost.
OpenUK looks to garner interest from various public sector organizations across the UK while also aiming to collaborate with global experts, delivering the best proposal for their country as a result.
FireDragon is the default browser on Garuda Linux, the Arch-based distro known for its polished KDE Plasma spins and reliability despite riding the bleeding edge. It has traditionally run on a Floorp base, giving it Firefox's extension support wrapped in Garuda's privacy defaults and Dr460nized branding.
Now the developers have flipped the playbook, changing its base and delivering a v13 release that's packed with many usability-focused improvements.
What's new?
This overhaul gets you a better search experience, where the default search engine is DuckDuckGo. It arrives alongside an expanded list of search tools that range from privacy-focused ones like Qwant, Brave Search, Startpage, and Big Tech options like Bing and Google.
Next is the improved onboarding experience, with the Welcome dialog now packing in one-click toggles for things you'd normally have to dig up in about:config.
Turn off the built-in password manager if you already rely on a separate one like Proton Pass (partner link), flip on ResistFingerprinting for tighter privacy at the risk of breaking sites, or switch on prefetching to speed up page loads.
New quick settings, search engine options, and pre-installed extensions (click/touch to expand).
Similarly, browsing speed sees a small bump with TLS 0-RTT now being enabled by default, cutting latency when reconnecting to sites you have already visited.
There's also the optional setting to enable prefetching (the same one as earlier), which starts loading a page the moment you hover over a link or downloads the next page in the background before you click it.
As for the other notable changes, v13 adds support for XDG Base Directories and now handles WebGL and DRM content through site permissions. It also drops Dark Reader from the default extension lineup, leaving Flagfox and uBlock Origin as the only pre-installed add-ons.
Should you ditch Firefox?
I spent time with FireDragon v13 to see how the new codebase holds up and whether it changes anything for someone deciding between it and stock Firefox. Most of it feels familiar, though there are a few rough edges worth flagging.
The quick-setup wizard, powered by the new Welcome dialog, left me a little disappointed as there's a lot of empty space on the page; however, the options themselves worked just fine.
Past that screen, the browsing experience feels like Floorp or Firefox with a Garuda twist to it.
Vertical tabs are where FireDragon comes closest to matching Firefox outright, with the layout looking nearly identical. The one kink is the title bar. Firefox hides it on Fedora Workstation (which comes with GNOME), but FireDragon shows an ugly one with no toggle anywhere in the settings to turn it off.
A bigger miss showed up with system theming. Firefox follows your system's dark or light mode automatically for both its interface and supported sites. FireDragon didn't do that for websites, even with the "Website appearance" option set to "Dark". I tested this across Mastodon, DuckDuckGo, and here (where you are reading the article).
Restarting the browser didn't help either. 😵
Enabling vertical tabs (left) and FireDragon Settings (right).
The dedicated FireDragon Settings page claws some of that back, with toggles for things like closing the browser window with the last tab, enabling middle-click paste, updating add-ons automatically, and additional controls for prefetching.
The Design tab lets you go further, letting you fine-tune any installed themes with a great degree of control over what gets shown and what doesn't.
So, should you ditch Firefox? If you're already on Garuda Linux, FireDragon v13 can be turned into a daily driver with some tweaking. If you're happily settled on Firefox itself, the theming bug and stubborn title bar make this a harder sell.
Get started
You can get the Dr460nized edition of FireDragon from Flathub for most Linux computers:
For Arch users, there are four AUR packages on offer. One that is pre-compiled (should be faster to install), the second one that needs compiling, and the other two are the same but with Catppuccin theming (link1, link2).
People on platforms like Windows and macOS or those looking for alternative packages for Linux can visit Garuda Linux's GitLab instance. There's also a documentation page you can refer to, but keep in mind that it is a bit outdated.
Pro Max is the fourth case in SunFounder's famed Pironman 5 case series. These tower cases turn your regular, naked, Raspberry Pi boards into a miniature tower PC.
So here, you get RGB fans and tower cooler for colling, RGB lights for asthetics, small OLED display for stats, full HDMI ports, GPIO pins exposed, NVMe HAT for adding SSDs and AI accelerator.
That's what more or less these cases offer. Only the Pironman Mini has fewer options.
The new Pironman 5 Pro Max has a 4.3" touchscreen, a camera, speakers, and a microphone in addition to what the Max version already offered. The new device is marketed around local AI. And that's what I would also like to focus on in this review, with whatever limited resources I have in my homelab setup.
✅ Same tower cooler and RGB fans as before, now properly in sync ✅ Touchscreen, camera mount, and USB microphone turn the Pi 5 into a capable AI desktop (for hobbyist projects) ✅ Ran cool, CPU stayed around 45°C under load in my testing ❎ Still a DIY kit ❎ No option to keep the small OLED display always on
📋
This device was sent to me by SunFounder for review. The experience and views expressed here are my own.
M.2 Hailo-8/8L compatible, swaps in for one NVMe slot
HDMI
2x full-size HDMI
Audio
2x built-in speakers, audio amplifier, USB microphone
Camera
Adjustable camera mount
Extras
Metal power button, RTC battery, GPIO expansion
The case costs $145.99. You can get it from SunFounder's website or from Amazon. I think the duty and shipping costs are included in the pricing, but confirm with them to be sure.
Raspberry Pi 5, NVMe SSDs, and the Hailo accelerator are not included. You're buying the case, the cooling, and the screens, and bringing your own Pi and storage.
Assembling the case
Like every Pironman case before it, this is a DIY kit. You assemble it yourself. As a reviewer, I get these cases to review before they are available to the public. And thus I get only paper manuals for assembly.
Assembling the Pironman 5 Pro Max case
Not a big deal. I take pride in accepting and completing the challenge. And since I already had the experience of building the previous Pironman models in the past, this one was relatively quicker. No major issue in assembling the case.
However, if this is your first Pironman case, budget more patience for the paper manual than I needed to.
SunFounder usually releases assembly video for their cases. Surprisingly, there is no assembly video for this case so far. I hope they release one soon because it could be challenging.
It's a reversible case!
This is what I noticed while assembling the case, although reversible is not the correct word here. See, there is a super long FPC cable that connects to the camera mount. I found it awkward to have a long cable exposed like this.
It made sense when I saw that there was scope for the camera to be mounted on both top/bottom surfaces. Meaning, you vertically rotate the device by 180 degrees and you have the power button and IPS touchscreen at the top.
This gives you flexibility as the exposed GPIO pins also change their position.
If you use the case with the screen at the top, you need to rotate the display from the operating system; otherwise, it will display everything in reverse. Also, it makes sense to set a screen timeout to save on power.
The OLED and power button behavior, rethought
The small OLED display has changed behavior across every generation, and it's worth mentioning out because it affects how you'll actually use the case day to day.
The original Pironman case kept stats on the small OLED all the time. Pironman Max introduced a tap-to-wake gesture instead, where you had to tap the top of the case to see anything, and honestly, that was an annoyance.
Small OLED screen displays system stats
The Pro Max changes this again. The small OLED isn't on by default anymore. You press the power button on the front to wake it, and pressing it again cycles through the different stats. To shut the system down, you hold the power button, the same way you'd shut down a real tower PC.
SunFounder has also pushed this new behavior back to the older Pironman cases through a software update, so if you own an earlier one, you'll see the same button logic after updating those Pironman specific Python scripts.
RGB fans, finally in sync
One thing that bothered me about the very first Pironman case was that the RGB lighting on the rear fans was slightly out of sync between the two fans. It's a small thing, but once I noticed it, I could not unnotice it.
RGB lights are in perfect sync
The Pro Max doesn't have this problem. Both fans run in sync now, and the case looks the way it was clearly meant to look.
Configuring the visuals
Everything I've described, the OLED behavior, the RGB lighting color and pattern, screen timeouts, is configurable through SunFounder's dashboard.
The bigger 4.3" touchscreen can be set to auto-dim and turn off after a period of inactivity, which is a sensible way to save a bit of power on an always-on device.
My one complaint is that there's no option to keep the small OLED always on for stats. If the old always-on behavior bothered some people enough to get a tap-to-wake option, and the tap-to-wake bothered others enough to get the current button-press behavior, the dashboard should really let you choose the original always-on mode too, for people like me who want the stats always visible at a glance.
Testing it as a local AI desktop
Pironman 5 Pro Max provides the following additional features from the previous Max version:
2 tiny speakers
USB-based microphone
IPS touchscreen
Camera plus mount
This is where the Pro Max earns its "Pro" name, so I put together two small projects that utilize these four additional projects.
First, I built a voice assistant using faster-whisper, piper-tts, sounddevice, openwakeword, and psutil. It listens for the wake word "Hey Jarvis" and handles simple requests like reading out CPU temperature and usage, both through the speaker and on the touchscreen.
Small AI project that listens and responds to commands
Second, I built a face greeter using opencv-contrib-python and piper-tts. I trained it on my own face and my daughter Ushika's face, so whenever the camera spots either of us, it announces "Hello Abhishek" or "Hello Ushika" through the speaker.
Note that Qt no longer ships fonts. Deploy some (from https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ for example) or switch to fontconfig.
Watching for faces. Press 'q' on the window, or Ctrl+C here, to stop.
Recognized ushika (confidence 68.9) -> greeting
Neither project is complicated on its own, you could run both on a bare Raspberry Pi 5 with a webcam and a USB speaker.
What the Pro Max adds is that everything, the mic, the camera mount, the speakers, and the screen to show status, is already built into one desktop-style unit. That's the whole pitch of this case, and in my testing, it delivered on it.
The OV5647 camera module that came with the case is decent. The official Raspberry Pi AI Camera might have performed even better.
Similarly, if I had Hailo 8 AI accelerator in this setup, these AI projects could easily be expanded to more serious work.
Cooling well done
Even while running these AI workloads, the case stayed cool. CPU temperature usually lingered around 45°C and goes to 56°C under load in my testing. I haven't tried it with an NVMe SSD or the Hailo AI accelerator installed, since I don't own either, so I can't speak to thermals once you add those into the mix.
But since it has one tower cooler and two PWM fans, it should provide the best possible cooling.
A case that keeps growing with the Pi 5
The Pironman line has been evolving with actual user demand, and you can see it clearly if you've followed all three previous versions.
The original Pironman 5 was a tower cooler with room for one NVMe SSD. Pironman 5 Max added a second NVMe slot, so you could mix an SSD with a Hailo AI accelerator instead of just stacking storage.
The Pro Max takes everything from the Max and adds a 4.3" screen and a camera mount on top. That combination, camera or AI camera plus AI accelerator plus SSD, gives you pretty much every upgrade path you could want on a Pi 5 right now.
It's versatile enough to be a basic NAS, a local AI box, a Home Assistant hub, or whatever other Pi project you have in mind, all in a proper desktop-style tower instead of a naked board on your desk.
Is the Pironman 5 Pro Max worth getting?
At $145.99 barebone, this sits well above the original Pironman 5 ($79.99) and the Pironman 5 Max ($94.99). So, you should weigh your needs and wants.
If you just want solid tower cooling and a place to put one NVMe SSD, the original Pironman 5 still does that job for less. Although its gray aluminum look may not be as cool as the dark ones like Max and Max Pro.
If you want dual NVMe with RAID or a Hailo accelerator alongside storage, the Max covers that without the screen and camera premium.
The Pro Max is for a more specific person: someone who wants to build voice assistants, camera-based projects, a Home Assistant hub, or general local AI experiments on a Raspberry Pi 5, and wants the mic, camera, and screen already integrated into a case instead of duct-taped together.
If that's the project you have in mind, this could be a good option. The versatility on offer here, NAS, AI box, Home Assistant hub, general Pi project machine, is hard to match.
Have you ever wished for a file manager that shows you nothing but audio files that you can play, and then play them within the manager itself? Yeah, I haven't either. But if you had, I might have discovered the application for you. Here comes SonicTree.
SonicTree: The Simple Music Player
SonicTree is an as-simple-as-it-gets kind of music player in the middle of all the fancy, all extensive ones we've recently seen (like the high-fidelity player Astra). It offers you an easy experience: a file-explorer, a list of playable audio files, playback of said audio files, and a simple playing menu at the bottom.
Most music players automatically categorize your music files based on the metadata of the file. This one desn't and that's its unique feature. If you are someone who has meticulously organized music files into folders of your own criteria, you might like SonicTree.
There's nothing much more or much less to it, but let us explore the features in detail.
Interface
SonicTree has a file-explorer on the left that is shown in a (surprise, surprise) tree structure. You can expand directories into subdirectories, and double clicking on any directory lists all the playable audio files on the big canvas on the right.
Besides the file title, there's also the track number, artist name, album name, duration and year of release.
On the bottom of this canvas, there's the playerback interface. It shows the song and artist name, the album cover, a seek for the song as well as the volume, buttons for playing, pausing, next track and previous track, and technical information of the song such as the filetype, bitrate, frequency, stereo settings and whether it is lossless or lossy.
On the top, there are two menus, one that rescans the folders, and one that can be used to change the repeat status to off, single track, or playlist.
The interface, though, looks very dated and clunky by modern application standards in 2026. The design looks like something from the early 2000s era and not in a chic way, and the song listings quite literally overlap on each other (at least on my system). The looks can be worked upon and straightened out a bit to bring it to the present, in my opinion.
Performance
SonicTree boasts low strain on the hardware of the system, and gapless playback, and on that counts it delivers well. It seems to barely have an impact on the system, taking about 50 MB RAM and 02-0.5% CPU usage (numbers may vary depending on your system). The playback is indeed gapless, seamlessly switching between tracks without a delay.
The playback of files is usually alright. I've tried MP3, WAV, M4A and OPUS audios, and they all work flawlessly. But these are all lossy formats. When I tried a lossless FLAC audio, it didn't play at all. That might be a dealbreaker for a lot of people, as mostly the point of an offline music player is to play lossless audio. But I can't really say that they don't deliver because on their website, they don't really list formats that are playable.
Navigation
As for the navigation, the seeks and the buttons on the GUI are the obvious choice, but there's a simple set of keyboard shortcuts as well that do the job. Space to toggle the playing, Enter to select the song from the list to play, Ctrl+Left or Right Arrows to change the track, Ctrl+Up or Down Arrows to increase/decrease volume, Shift+Right/Left to seek through the song, and finally, Esc to exit.
Get SonicTree
SonicTree can be downloaded from its official page on SourceForge.net, and is available only as an AppImage:
SonicTree doesn't offer much. It looks a little awkward, a little out of time, but it gets the job done. It is essentially for people who like managing their music files in their own way, in their own folder structure. Can't say if I can count it among the list of best music players for Linux.
The shortcomings can't really be pointed out, as they didn't really claim to cover it all in the first place. But since this is still a very early version, perhaps more improvement will be seen in the later ones.
Every two years, Canonical puts out a Long Term Support release that gets five years of security updates, which can be stretched further with Ubuntu Pro. In between those LTS releases, Canonical ships an interim version every six months, and each one is supported for nine months.
Those releases don't carry the same importance as an LTS, but that's the point. They give Canonical room to test newer kernels, toolchains, and design changes with a smaller user base before those changes get baked into the next LTS.
The next one, Ubuntu 26.10, carries the codename "Stonking Stingray", continuing the tradition of ordered alphabetical codenames after Resolute Raccoon (26.04).
Stonking is British slang for something impressively big or excellent, and a stingray is the flat-bodied, boneless fish that spends most of its time half-buried in sand near the seafloor (which is quite understandable seeing the state of this world).
If things go as planned, it will land on October 15, 2026, with a short support window that will close in July 2027.
⏱️Ubuntu 26.10 Release Schedule
Below is the release schedule as laid out by Canonical; do keep in mind that some of these dates might change if there are any regressions or other developmental hurdles.
Milestone
Date
Ubuntu Testing Week (optional)
July 2, 2026
Feature Freeze
August 20, 2026
Ubuntu Testing Week (optional)
August 27, 2026
Beta Release
September 24, 2026
Kernel Freeze
October 1, 2026
Release Candidate
October 8, 2026
Final Release
October 15, 2026
Know that this is kind of a live blog where we will be adding new changes and handling any anticipated features as they appear. So, yeah, let's see what's coming with Ubuntu 26.10. 👇
Something for New Installations
The typical installation and onboarding experience of Ubuntu.
Canonical is redesigning how Ubuntu gets installed, with a sharper focus on cutting down the complexity around partitioning and storage configuration. The new design is set to lean on safe defaults, guided workflows, and will be hiding advanced options behind a button (presumably) instead of throwing everything at you at once.
Alongside the installer, a new onboarding flow is in the works too. Instead of asking you to make every decision during setup, Ubuntu will move personalization and configuration into a dedicated first-boot experience after the system is already up and running.
Organizations deploying Ubuntu at scale will still be able to automate and configure these onboarding steps, just like they can with the current installer (pictured above).
Worth noting that both of these are explicitly aimed at Ubuntu 28.04 LTS. The design work is happening during the 26.10 cycle, but don't expect the finished experience to show up fully baked in this release.
Linux Kernel 7.x
The Snapshot 2 build of Ubuntu 26.10 that I tested came with Linux kernel 7.0.0-14, but treat that as a temporary implementation rather than a final answer. Canonical changed its kernel selection policy back in 2024, opting to ship whatever upstream kernel version is the latest available at release freeze, even if it's still in Release Candidate status.
That policy got extended further in 2025 to also track interim kernel versions during the development cycle itself through monthly snapshots, for better test coverage along the way.
That means the kernel version could easily shift between now and October. We have already covered what Linux kernel 7.0 itself brought to the table, so if you want the full rundown, that's a good place to start.
A Major D-Bus Change
Ubuntu is finally swapping out dbus-daemon, the default D-Bus implementation it's used since its very first release back in 2004, in favor of dbus-broker.
If you didn't know, D-Bus is the messaging system your desktop relies on constantly, letting apps, background services, and the system itself pass messages back and forth. Anything from plugging in a USB drive to updating a notification badge runs through it.
Dbus-daemon has held up fine as the reference implementation for over two decades, but it has limits. Under heavy load, messages can vanish unexpectedly, and it queries message targets sequentially instead of all at once, which adds up to latency as the bus gets busier.
Dbus-broker addresses both by design, built around an asynchronous, event-driven architecture from the ground up, and it's already the default on several other distros.
GNOME 51
Ubuntu 26.10 is shipping with GNOME 51, the upcoming stable release from the GNOME project that's scheduled to be out sometime in mid-September. We start with the Shell changes first, which has picked up many fixes that you will actually notice during daily use.
Screenshot selections now stretch cleanly to monitor edges instead of stopping short, the power-off dialog properly shows its "Install Updates" checkbox again, and the overview search box stops resetting its loading spinner every time you type a character.
It also swaps in custom sound effects instead of pulling from the system sound theme, saves and restores your monitor brightness across sessions, and only lights up the audio input icon in the top bar while your mic is actually recording.
The rest of the desktop environment picks up smaller but still visible changes.
The Settings app drops the "Windowing System" (Wayland ftw, I guess?) field from the About page and condenses system details into a single page. Similarly, Software now warns you before installing an app that's already reached end-of-life, and Calendar got its internals rebuilt around GListModel for better performance and has picked up support for opening Teams meeting links directly.
Mutter, GNOME's window manager, is dropping support for legacy NVIDIA drivers.
AI is Coming
If you remember, Canonical shared their plans to handle AI on Ubuntu back in April, when Jon Seager split things into two approaches. Implicit AI improves things you already use without you noticing, and explicit AI is the kind you'd actually summon on purpose.
The short version of it all was that everything would be local-first and built around open-weight models rather than forcing a cloud subscription onto users.
One of the earliest features under this new initiative is Myna, a local speech-to-text tool built around a simple push-to-talk flow. Hold a hotkey, speak, and the transcribed text lands wherever your cursor was sitting.
Recognition happens entirely on your machine through a sandboxed component called the Canonical Inference Snap, with different model sizes to match whatever hardware you're running.
Ubuntu Certified Check
If you ever wondered whether your device was officially supported by Ubuntu, then you will like this one. The Settings menu is getting a simple way to check whether your machine is Ubuntu Certified.
Once live, it will show up inside the About page, where it will pull a certification status for your exact hardware model, checked against Canonical's own database.
Results range fromfully certified to certified for a different Ubuntu version, close to a certified model, not certified, or unable to check.
Package-Agnostic Approach
The App Center is getting rebuilt to handle apps consistently no matter which packaging format they come in, with unified search, ratings, categories, and metadata.
Earlier, when Canonical rebuilt Ubuntu's software center into App Center for 23.10, it launched without the ability to install local DEB files at all. Double-clicking one either threw an error or left you staring at a spinner that never resolved.
That got fixed with an update to Ubuntu 24.04's App Center months later.
Continued Rustification
Canonical is putting more weight behind memory-safe Rust rewrites, recently becoming a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation with a €40,000 yearly contribution.
Ubuntu's already swapped coreutils, findutils, diffutils, and sudo for their Rust equivalents, with sudo-rs becoming the default in 25.10. Ntpd-rs is next in line, a Rust rewrite of the tools Ubuntu uses to keep system clocks synced.
The Trifecta funding is going toward catching ntpd-rs up to chrony on features like multi-threaded NTP servers and GPSd support, alongside AppArmor and seccomp hardening.
Although ntpd-rs is arriving in the testing archives for 26.10, it becoming the default is planned for next year, when Ubuntu 27.04 is introduced.
Miscellaneous Additions
And here are a bunch of smaller but important changes that deserve your attention now that you have scrolled so far. ☠️
Continued push toward WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility compliance.
New wallpapers, chosen through the usual community wallpaper contest, though Canonical hasn't announced it yet.
The full desktop experience for RISC-V, targeting RVA23-compliant hardware.
Better driver management controls, with clearer metadata and maturity indicators for available drivers.
Microsoft password and MFA authentication support through authd, with approval requests routed through Microsoft Authenticator.
An experimental amd64v3 (x86-64-v3) package archive for testing performance gains on newer Intel and AMD CPUs.
A proposed change to strip signed GRUB builds down to bare essentials for Secure Boot, dropping support for filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS in the process.
📥 Download Ubuntu 26.10
While the stable ISOs for this interim Ubuntu release are a few months out, you can take the snapshots for test runs on a virtual machine or a spare machine.
We don't recommend installing such images on computers that are used daily or on production-sensitive deployments because these contain components that might break at any time.
