'Questing Quokka' enters UI freeze as Ubuntu 25.10 nears release

Rust coreutils, TPM encryption, and GNOME 49 line up for October debut

The Quokka is a small, furry, and perpetually smiling marsupial from Australia. It's very cute – and now it's freezing.

Ubuntu "Questing Quokka" – which will be 25.10 – was already in Feature Freeze but now it's also in UI Freeze.

We've kept you informed of the plans since what we dubbed the Pudgy Puffin back in April, and while most of those things are coming true, there are also some last-minute changes.

We knew the plan was that Questing would swap GNU coreutils for Rust. Well, the new sudo-rs is now in place.

There's been a lot of recent development activity in the Rust Coreutils project. Version 0.2 appeared on September 6. As Linux benchmarking site Phoronix reports, the big gains are in performance. Until recently, the new Rusty tools were about ten times slower than the traditional GNU versions implemented in C, but as of this release, they have leapfrogged the older versions and are now 50 percent faster. This probably won't make much visible difference to most people in daily use, but safer and faster sounds like a good combination.

This version has been included in what Ubuntu calls a pocket. Since then, though, a new version 0.2.2 appeared, just yesterday at the time of writing.

The work-in-progress release notes contain some more nuggets of info. The TPM-backed full-disk encryption, which we covered in July, seems to have made it in, because there's at least one outstanding bug. Although it has yet to see a finished release, the latest builds use kernel 6.17. This means there's a small risk that Questing will ship with a release candidate kernel, and get updated to the final version post-release. Questing is only an interim release, with a mere nine months of support ahead – its end of life is July 2026, a few months after 26.04, the next LTS release.

Back in July, we looked at systemd 258, a major and slightly delayed release. Agent P's team is still working on it: release candidate 4 appeared recently. That's too late for Questing, which will still use systemd 257.

For a taste of what's coming, although it hasn't reached alpha yet, daily builds are available. A beta is expected in about a week, and the final release is scheduled for October 9.

Gnomic utterances, prophesying X

From its beginnings 21 years ago, Ubuntu releases were synced with the semi-annual releases of the GNOME desktop, so that a new version of Ubuntu would always come with the freshest GNOME. The default edition of Questing will use GNOME 49, and back in June we reported that this was planned to be Wayland-only.

Well, it seems that this decision from the GNOME team was maybe a little premature. The GNOME 49 release candidate is out, and it contains a surprise. Its developers have re-enabled X11 in the GDM login screen.

The provisional Questing release notes link to the GNOME 49 Alpha release announcement, which mentions some significant changes. The new Showtime movie player replaces Totem. Papers, which appeared back with GNOME 48, now replaces the Evince document viewer. Perhaps less visibly for most people, the new Manuals replaces the old Devhelp documentation browser.

The new Ptyxis terminal emulator looks likely, too. This is GPU-accelerated, like the Ghostty terminal emulator we looked at in January – but unlike that, or the popular Alacritty, which we last saw in CachyOS, Ptyxis is closely integrated with GNOME.

If you don't get on with GNOME, and many do not, other desktops are available in alternate Ubuntu flavors. For instance, a new version of the Budgie desktop, version 10.9.3, just appeared. Although it's only a minor point release, this is the first in a year, and judging from the Budgie flavor's file manifest, it might have just made it under the wire. Budgie is built from some of the GNOME foundations, and this version aligns those with GNOME 49, which has meant forking a couple of components that have now been subsumed into GNOME Shell.

Most of Ubuntu's alternative desktops still support good old X.org, and X11 does seem to be refusing to die. The controversial XLibre fork is now up to its 11th release. We're not expecting Ubuntu to adopt it in the foreseeable future, but a growing list of distros either do or are working on it. ®