As a very pleasant surprise, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release will now be powered by the Linux 7.3 kernel rather than their original plans and switch over to the Linux 7.2 kernel.

Back in May the Canonical kernel team announced Ubuntu 26.10 would ship with Linux 7.2 based on their release alignment at the time for shipping the latest upstream major kernel release in this October update of Ubuntu Linux. But come today with Phoronix reader emails and in sudo apt dist-upgrade on some of my test machines, Linux 7.3 is now present as a very wonderful surprise.

Linux 7.3 will be powering Ubuntu 26.10 rather than Linux 7.2. It turns out there was a Discourse post I missed earlier this month where they announced a re-alignment to Linux 7.3. Due to no delays for Linux 7.1 and Linux 7.2, Canonical's kernel team is comfortable enough with Linux 7.3 rather than Linux 7.2.

"Following up on our earlier announcement, the Canonical Kernel Team has reassessed our target kernel for the Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) release.

Thanks to the upstream Linux development schedule, which faced no delays during the 7.1 and 7.2 release cycles and has already seen the release of 7.3-rc1, we are excited to share that we are stepping up our target: Ubuntu 26.10 will now target the Linux 7.3 kernel instead of 7.2.

This update keeps us aligned with the latest upstream capabilities, particularly for the latest hardware support, while remaining on track for our upcoming release milestones.

The team is currently working on enabling all Ubuntu-specific features on top of the 7.3-rc1 upstream kernel; it will be available soon in the -proposed pocket for early testing."

This is great considering all the new features and improvements in Linux 7.3.

The Linux 7.3 kernel was in the proposed archive for the Stonking Stingray but is now rolling out to the Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking" archive ahead of next week's beta release.

Ubuntu 26.10 is scheduled for release on 15 October while the kernel freeze is on 1 October. So for the official ISOs prior to the stable release updates it will end up on a pre-release kernel state. If Linux 7.3 releases on-time it will be out on 18 October otherwise if an additional release candidate is needed it would be pushed back to 25 October. With this not being an Ubuntu LTS release, they are vigorously pursuing the latest upstream kernel version.