RISC-V gets its first official Ubuntu desktop images in Ubuntu 26.10

Canonical has announced the general availability of Ubuntu Desktop images for the RISC-V architecture. With Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray", due out on October 15, 2026, RISC-V computers get officially supported Ubuntu desktop images for the first time.

Supported Hardware

Daily build images for RISC-V have existed since June, but they were clearly labeled as work in progress. Ubuntu 26.10 introduces RISC-V desktop images for RVA23-compliant systems, including the Milk-V Jupiter 2 Mini-ITX, the DeepComputing DC-ROMA, and the SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX. Canonical recommends starting with SpacemiT K3 hardware, which receives official support with Ubuntu 26.10; the installation guide for the SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX is already in place.

Xubuntu Minimal for Virtual Machines

Alongside the official images, there are unofficial and unsupported Xubuntu Minimal images for RISC-V. Canonical says the Xfce-based minimal image is easier to run under emulation, where the GNOME desktop can take over 30 minutes to load in QEMU. The images are experimental and carry no official support yet; work on the known issues is ongoing ahead of the release, and bug reports on Launchpad are welcome.

Booting on Real Hardware

The installation instructions for the SpacemiT K3 walk through flashing the board's firmware, preparing the board, and installing the image onto the internal UFS storage or an NVMe drive. For other hardware, the cdimage download page notes that a first-stage bootloader such as U-Boot and the relevant Device Tree Blobs (DTBs) must be copied onto the image before use; the SiFive HiFive Unmatched is named there as an example.

Ubuntu 26.10 is expected to ship with GNOME 51 as the default desktop and the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel series. The RISC-V desktop images can be downloaded from the Ubuntu CD image server, the Xubuntu Minimal image from the same site. Other flavors with their own RISC-V images have not been announced.