Canonical Makes RISC-V Desktop Testing Easier With Official Ubuntu 26.10 Builds

Installing the Ubuntu desktop on RISC-V hardware has just become significantly more straightforward. With the upcoming release of Ubuntu 26.10, Canonical has begun building official riscv64 desktop images, marking a major milestone for open-source architecture enthusiasts, developers, and hardware manufacturers alike.

As part of this rollout, experimental versions of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release are now out for public testing, tailored specifically for hardware such as the SpacemiT K3—a powerful development board that Canonical has been actively collaborating on with SpacemiT. To accommodate different user needs and hardware environments, developers can choose between two distinct installation options. One ISO ships with the standard GNOME desktop environment, while the other is built around a lightweight Xubuntu minimal configuration.

Valentin Haudiquet of Canonical has noted that both of these newly introduced ISOs are strictly "experimental" in nature and "carry no official support" at this early stage of development. Because they are still undergoing active refinement, users should expect that they will not work flawlessly straight out of the box. These early builds contain various minor issues and rough edges that are scheduled to be thoroughly addressed and resolved ahead of the final, stable version’s official release on October 15, 2026.

Why Are There Two Images?

The decision to provide two distinct desktop images stems from the current landscape of RISC-V hardware development. RISC-V hardware that complies with the modern RVA23 baseline is still relatively new to the market, meaning that many software developers and engineers who want to test and develop for RISC-V do not yet have physical access to high-end silicon.

Instead, many developers rely on hardware emulation tools like QEMU. However, running a resource-intensive graphical environment like the standard GNOME desktop inside an emulator can be sluggish, with boot and load times stretching up to 30 minutes in certain virtualized setups. To mitigate this and provide a vastly more responsive testing experience for emulator users, Canonical introduced the lighter, quicker Xubuntu minimal alternative alongside the full-featured GNOME option.

On real, physical hardware, meanwhile, the GNOME image is reported to deliver a remarkably nice and performant desktop experience. Given the recent, rapid leaps and bounds in RISC-V hardware capabilities and processing performance, this development is particularly encouraging for those tracking the architecture’s transition into the mainstream desktop space.

Reaching this stage has required extensive foundational engineering across various layers of the Ubuntu ecosystem. For instance, Canonical’s ongoing work to add robust RISC-V support to Flutter was a crucial component of the broader effort to get here. Many core Ubuntu applications—including the operating system’s graphical installer itself—rely heavily on Flutter frameworks. While the vast majority of the operating system is now functional on the architecture, a few desktop software snaps are not yet fully RISC-V ready, most notably the App Center, which continues to undergo porting and optimization work.

Furthermore, engineering teams had to implement significant changes to livecd-rootfs to ensure the build system could properly handle complex device trees. At the same time, Ubuntu’s overarching build pipeline had to be upgraded and reconfigured to successfully generate these brand-new riscv64 ISO files automatically.

But Weren’t RISC-V Tablets Sold With Ubuntu On Them?

For observers who have followed the trajectory of RISC-V computing closely, the arrival of official desktop images might raise questions, given that various RISC-V tablets, laptops, and single-board computers have previously been sold with pre-installed versions of Ubuntu.

This is indeed not the first time Ubuntu has provided installers for the RISC-V architecture. Server installation images have been available for several years, allowing advanced users to manually install a graphical desktop environment on top of a headless server installation. These server builds existed long before Canonical officially raised the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) profile to RVA23, a strategic move designed to exclusively support newer, high-performance boards rather than legacy, low-power experimentation silicon.

However, prior to this development, fully official installation images featuring a pre-installed graphical desktop environment were simply not provided directly by Canonical. Third-party hardware companies that partnered with Canonical to enable Ubuntu RISC-V support—many of which have commercialized RISC-V tablets and laptops—frequently had to construct, maintain, and host their own customized recovery and installation images independently.

The introduction of official desktop images effectively resolves this fragmentation. Users can now obtain official desktop images designed specifically for modern 64-bit RISC-V (RVA23 and newer) hardware from the exact same central repository used for traditional Intel, AMD, and Arm64 architectures.

For enterprise users or developers who prefer a more conservative release cycle, options are also available outside of the bleeding-edge testing branch. An Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS riscv64 desktop ISO is also accessible, though it currently lacks direct support for the SpacemiT K3 board, a limitation that Haudiquet has indicated will be remedied in the near future.

Developers and enthusiasts wishing to evaluate the new builds can download the experimental Ubuntu 26.10 desktop RISC-V image directly from the daily builds folder on the official Ubuntu CD image repository, while the corresponding Xubuntu 26.10 RISC-V image is available within the Xubuntu daily minimal build directories.