Ubuntu 25.10 lands: Rustier and Wayland-ier, but Flatpak is broken

The latest interim release of Ubuntu is here, showcasing some significant changes. This isn't a long-term release, yet many of its differences will be in 26.04 next year.

At the end of last week, Canonical released Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka," along with nine of the ten official flavors. The release notes cover what's new.

A fairly significant bug was discovered after the Quokka was released: Flatpak is broken due to a bug in how Ubuntu's AppArmor security module handles the fusermount3 command. There is a workaround and a fix is in progress. The Ubuntu desktop doesn't include Flatpak as standard and neither do any of the flavors, but many users do prefer Flatpak to Canonical's own Snap format. So much so that Flatpak is the default in multiple downstream Ubuntu-based distros, notably Linux Mint but also including Elementary OS, Zorin OS, and Anduin OS.

Ubuntu and its upstream Debian both use AppArmor, while most distros from the Red Hat family use SELinux instead. Notably, the recently released openSUSE Leap 16 switched from AppArmor to SELinux, as we reported when we looked at the release candidate in August.

The missing flavor is Ubuntu Unity, of which there won't be a Questing version. On the remix's Telegram channel, admin Maik Adamietz said:

The Register has already covered much of what's new in version 25.10. Instead of the GNU coreutils, it has new implementations in Rust, including the sudo utility. "Questing" includes a preview version of the TPM-chip backed Full Disk Encryption system, which Canonical has been working on for a couple of years.

The default graphical desktop edition uses GNOME 49 with some new apps, as we described when it reached beta. As we reported earlier in the development cycle, only GNOME on Wayland is included. There's no X11 session. This also applies to Kubuntu 25.10, which comes with KDE Plasma 6.4 and is equally Wayland-centric.

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This implies a few important details that we feel we should spell out. Firstly, both Ubuntu 25.10 and Kubuntu 25.10 do install XWayland by default, so X11 apps work seamlessly. Secondly, this change doesn't apply to the other official flavors with other desktops, which still use X.org. This includes Ubuntu Budgie 25.10, or "Questing Budgie" as we like to think of it – although that flavor team is aiming to be Wayland-only for version 26.04. In turn, the fact that the other desktops still use X11 means that all the X.org packages are still in the Ubuntu repositories, so you can install GNOME-on-X11 or Plasma-on-X11 sessions if you want or need them.

On other platforms, there are deeper changes. The Raspberry Pi edition of Ubuntu has a new A/B boot mechanism, as described by Dave Jones, Canonical's boffin for all things Pi, in a blog post back in July. It also defaults to doing a minimal installation. On other Arm64 hardware, the new universal ISO uses a new UEFI boot stub, which is called stubble and enables Secure Boot support on some hardware, such as some laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC.

The RISC-V edition requires the new RVA23S64 ISA profile, which has the slight snag that means for now it only runs in emulation under QEMU. All nine of the existing supported RISC-V boards are stuck with Ubuntu 24.04.3 for the time being.

There are some less visible changes under the hood, such as new time sync tools, and the initramfs is now built with dracut instead of the old initramfs-tools package. Changes like this, and the new coreutils and sudo tools, will be invisible to most users – but they will affect some people with unusual configs. That, of course, is why they're happening in an interim release.

The current interim release, Plucky Puffin, goes end of life in January – so Plucky users should upgrade to Questing before then. We called it Pudgy Puffin for its 6 GB ISO size, and Questing is barely any smaller: the GNOME variant is a 5.7 GB download. It uses 1.7 GB of RAM at idle, and takes up 7 GB of disk. The weight gain doesn't affect the other flavors, though: it's something Gnomic.

Questing Quokka will reach the end of its life in nine months, in July 2026. ®