Ubuntu Stonking Stingray swims into spotlight with pre-release kernel

The latest interim release of Ubuntu is here, complete with kernel 7.3 – even though it isn't officially out yet. It also includes a new speech-to-text system that is intriguing but not fully useful. Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" arrived on time. This is just a couple of weeks after the beta version that we looked at earlier this month, suggesting that the team didn’t encounter any show-stopper bugs. The faster kernel release cycle that Canonical adopted in 2024 has slightly bitten them this time around: the Linux kernel’s new faster AI-boosted release cycle means that 7.2 is relatively old now, but 7.3 isn’t quite ready yet; at the time of writing, it’s on Release Candidate 7 – but Canonical has jumped the gun and used it anyway. So, the release version of Ubuntu 26.10 comes with a pre-release kernel, and machines will get updated to the completed 7.3 as soon as it’s available. …