In the mood for testing? The fourth monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 is now available for download.

It’s unusual for Ubuntu to produce a snapshot the same month a beta release is due, and this is also the second snapshot published this month: Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 3 arrived in early September. Strange times with the Stonking Stingray!

“These should be very close to what the Beta candidates will look like next week, so don’t shy away from testing them”, said Canonical’s Utkarsh Gupta in the mailing list announcement.

Since Snapshot 3, more package updates have been updated: the GNOME 51 release, a complete set of Rust core utilities and some minor theme changes, including a set of new desktop wallpapers featuring the release mascot.

This snapshot runs on the Linux 7.2 kernel, but Ubuntu 26.10 will use the Linux 7.3 kernel.

Ubuntu’s monthly snapshots are not alpha builds and are not production ready. The team say to treat them as “throwaway artifacts”. Their purpose is to let Canonical test and iterate on newer build machinery.

If you’re not a developer or a hardened bug hunter, but you want to try the changes ahead of time, I recommend you wait until the Ubuntu 26.10 Beta is released next week (24 September).

Don’t want to wait? Download Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 4 from the cdimage server. You’ll find snapshots for Ubuntu 26.10 and its various flavours, spins and hardware variants, including Raspberry Pi and Arm64 and, new this cycle, Ubuntu Amd64-v3 builds too.