Ubuntu now has official desktop images for RISC-V

Experimental versions of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release are already out for testing, specifically tailored for the SpacemiT K3 development board. This hardware platform is the result of close collaboration between Canonical and SpacemiT, reflecting a shared commitment to ensuring that robust operating system support evolves alongside cutting-edge silicon. To accommodate different testing needs and hardware constraints, Canonical is providing two distinct ISO variants. One image ships with the standard GNOME desktop environment, while the other is built around a lightweight Xubuntu minimal configuration.

According to Canonical’s Valentin Haudiquet, both of these newly introduced ISOs are strictly designated as experimental 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 and may contain various issues. These rough edges are expected to be systematically addressed and ironed out ahead of the final, stable version of Ubuntu 26.10, which is officially scheduled for release on October 15, 2026.

Why are there two images?

The decision to offer two distinct desktop variants stems from the current landscape of RISC-V hardware development. RISC-V hardware that complies with the modern RVA23 baseline specification is still relatively new to the market. Consequently, many software developers who are eager to test and develop for the RISC-V architecture do not yet have physical access to high-end development boards. Instead, they rely heavily on software emulation tools like QEMU.

In virtualized environments like QEMU, running a full-featured desktop environment can be resource-intensive, with the heavy GNOME desktop sometimes taking up to as long as thirty minutes just to load initial components. To mitigate this bottleneck and provide a smoother workflow for developers working in emulated environments, the Xubuntu minimal image offers a much lighter, quicker alternative that reduces waiting times and accelerates testing cycles.

Conversely, on physical hardware that meets the necessary architectural standards, the GNOME image is reported to deliver a remarkably nice and performant desktop experience. Given the rapid, recent jumps in RISC-V hardware capabilities, this performance validation is encouraging news for the open-source community, signaling that the architecture is steadily maturing from an embedded novelty into a viable desktop computing platform.

Getting to this stage required considerable engineering effort from Canonical across multiple software stacks. Part of this preparatory work involved adding dedicated RISC-V support to Flutter, a crucial step because many modern Ubuntu applications—including the core operating system installer itself—rely heavily on the framework. However, the ecosystem transition is still ongoing; a few desktop snaps are not yet fully RISC-V ready, including the newly introduced App Center, which will require further upstream adjustments before it can function natively on the architecture.

In addition to user-facing applications, foundational build infrastructure also required modification. Engineers had to implement critical changes to livecd-rootfs to properly handle device trees, and Ubuntu’s internal build pipeline had to be significantly upgraded to reliably generate the new riscv64 ISO images at scale.

But weren’t RISC-V tablets sold with Ubuntu on?

The arrival of official desktop images might raise questions for followers of the architecture, given that various RISC-V devices have previously appeared on the market bundled with Ubuntu. This is not technically the first time Ubuntu has provided installation pathways for RISC-V hardware; server images have been publicly available for years, and enterprising users could manually layer a graphical desktop environment on top of them. This long predates Canonical’s decision to formally raise the ISA profile requirement to RVA23, a move designed to ensure that official software efforts focus exclusively on newer, more performant hardware boards.

However, prior to this announcement, official installation images with a graphical desktop environment preinstalled were simply not provided directly by Canonical.

Hardware companies and silicon vendors that have collaborated closely with Canonical on Ubuntu RISC-V support—many of which have successfully manufactured and commercialized RISC-V tablets, laptops, and single-board computers preloaded with Ubuntu—have historically been forced to build, maintain, and host their own proprietary recovery and installation images.

The introduction of official desktop images resolves this fragmentation. Developers and consumers alike can now obtain official desktop images for modern 64-bit RISC-V hardware directly from the primary distribution channels, downloaded from the exact same locations used for traditional Intel, AMD, and Arm64 platforms.

For users who prefer the stability of a Long Term Support release, Canonical has also made an Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS riscv64 desktop ISO available, though initial support for the SpacemiT K3 board is not included in that specific release, with Haudiquet noting that LTS board support will be arriving soon.

Developers and testers interested in evaluating the work-in-progress software can download the experimental Ubuntu 26.10 desktop image for RISC-V from the daily builds directory on the official Ubuntu image server, while the alternative Xubuntu 26.10 RISC-V build is accessible through the dedicated Xubuntu daily minimal directory.