It's been a little over a month since Canonical officially launched Plucky Puffin. Shortly after, development began on Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka, and we begin to learn the first details of this future iteration. Among them, that will use a Rust-based version of sudo called sudo-rs o will change the terminal to Ptyxis. Furthermore, in past versions, the decision was made to use the latest available kernel, even though it was still in the experimental phase during the operating system's development phase. Even if the stable kernel version arrived after the operating system version.
A few hours ago, Kleber Souza from the Ubuntu kernel team confirmed that Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka will use Linux 6.17, as long as everything goes according to plan. Those plans call for Linux 6.15 to arrive this Sunday, 6.16 on July 27, and 6.17 from the 28 from September to the 12 from October. Those are the deadlines, if I'm not mistaken, for the next Linux versions to arrive if there aren't any extra weeks requiring the release of eighth Release Candidates. The extra RCs would change the picture slightly.
Ubuntu 25.10 coming in October with GNOME 49 and more Rust
In the worst-case scenario, if eighth RCs were released for Linux 6.15, 6.16, and 6.17, Linux 6.17 would arrive in mid-October, just in time to be included in Ubuntu 25.10, or days late, since Questing Quokka is coming on October 9th. The new kernel policy says they'll be using the latest kernel, so they could include one of the latest RCs if necessary and then upgrade to the stable version shortly after.
Before all this, Canonical has weeks to add changes, and many are still expected. When that time comes, it's almost a certainty that Questing Quokka will arrive with GNOME 49 in the main edition, as well as a base with packages updated to October 2025.