Ubuntu 25.10, codenamed “Questing Quokka,” reaches end of life on July 9, 2026. That’s nine months after its October 9, 2025 release, the standard support window Canonical gives every interim (non-LTS) Ubuntu release. Anyone still running 25.10 past this date is on an unsupported system with no path back to security patches short of upgrading.

What Stops Working

Once the end-of-life date passes, Ubuntu Security Notices no longer cover 25.10 at all, meaning no new CVE patches for the kernel, core packages, or anything shipped through the official archive. Canonical also stops providing new drivers, application package updates, and official support requests tied to the release.

It’s not only Canonical’s own repositories that go quiet. Most third-party PPAs stop building for 25.10 once it’s out of support, and major third-party repositories, Google Chrome, Firefox’s PPA builds, and the WineHQ repository among them, typically drop the release from their supported target list as well. In practice this means package installs and updates will start failing in scattered, hard-to-predict ways as dependencies age out, rather than everything breaking cleanly at once.

# Check your current release
lsb_release -a

# See what's currently held back or broken before you upgrade
sudo apt update
sudo apt list --upgradable

Why 25.10 Only Got Nine Months

This is expected behavior, not a shortened cycle. Ubuntu’s interim (non-LTS) releases, the ones on the .04 and .10 six-month cadence that aren’t April-of-an-even-year LTS drops, carry nine months of standard support by design. They exist to give users and developers early access to newer kernels, toolchains, and desktop environments between LTS cycles, not to be run long-term. 25.10 was itself the release immediately preceding the 26.04 LTS cycle, which is now the recommended landing spot.

The Upgrade Path

# From 25.10, the supported jump is directly to 26.04 LTS
sudo do-release-upgrade

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, released April 23, 2026, carries five years of standard support (through April 2031) and up to ten years under a free Ubuntu Pro subscription for personal use. It’s also the base for Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint’s next cycle, Pop!_OS, and a long list of other derivatives, so it’s the release most third-party repositories and PPA maintainers will be targeting going forward.

Running do-release-upgrade handles the transition directly and is the supported path Canonical documents; manually editing /etc/apt/sources.list to point at 26.04 ahead of time is possible but not the recommended route, since the upgrade tool handles conffile conflicts and package transitions that a manual source-list swap does not.

If You Can’t Upgrade Immediately

For systems that genuinely cannot move to 26.04 right away, the safest interim posture is to avoid installing new packages that would pull in updates from repositories that have already dropped 25.10 support, and to treat the system as effectively frozen until the upgrade can happen. There is no official extended security maintenance option for interim releases the way there is for LTS releases under Ubuntu Pro, so there’s no vendor-backed way to stay on 25.10 securely past this date.